Yes, it was one of their "secret sauce" things that they kept top secret for a long time. Fundamentally, if you change the question from "putting computers into data centers" to "how can I build a building sized computer?" it changes the way you think. Microsoft has been somewhat late to that particular party, both Facebook (perhaps with some Google knowledge "leakage") and Amazon have done a good job of internalizing this view point.
It scares the crap out of data center providers because they know they can't really innovate like this effectively. I tried to get Equinex to consider building Open Compute racks in a different style of co-location setup but never got anywhere with them.
A lot of engineers have passed through Google. The interesting thing about the Bay Area at least as this sort of porous sponge works both ways, people come from competitors, people go too competitors, they all carry a point of view and their own view on solving the problems at hand.
I am fortunate that I spent a few years in the platforms group and got a good look at how Google did what they did, and with that perspective have watched ideas in data center design emerge and flow. As the article points out Google does publish interesting bits of data, which lead to certain conclusions. And many of the same things that drove Google to do what it did, become the more likely answer when you own the entire data center (or better yet build it from scratch). I sat through a presentation of the big Ebay data center project in Utah and noted how they were coming up with the same answers to some of the same problems.
Because of that I doubt any one person is largely responsible there. There seems to have been a lot of cross pollination.
They've been doing this for over a decade. From the article:
> And Google said way back in April 2009, in a rare look at its internal datacenters, that it had not only been using containerized datacenters to boost efficiency since 2005, but had put 12 volt battery packs on its servers so they could ride out failures on local, rather than centralized, stored power. That was a decade ago, just to show you how far ahead Google can sometimes be compared to its rivals.
That will teach me to just skim the article (and to instead Ctrl-F Google :)
Apparently Microsoft did do some significant innovation compared to Google's 2009 design at least:
"The innovation that Microsoft did on this idea was to hack into the switched mode power supply used in its Open Cloud Server machines and put the battery right into the existing circuits. So the battery is not hanging off to one side, as they did in the Google servers from 2009, but is embedded in the power supply without any extra circuit costs. And importantly, the batteries are not in the power path between the electrical source and the server motherboards and components. Rather, they extend the life of the bulk capacitors in the power supply in the event of a power failure in the main feeds."
I think this article is written on purpose to make a small improvement on googles approach from 5 years ago look more impressive than it is.
Here's an image of a "google server" from 2009: http://www.altenergystocks.com/archives/2009/04/leadacid_bat... The innovation that google made was to first run the mainboards with +12V only, generating all other rails on the mainboard from this supply (that's why only yellow wires are going from the PSU to the mainboard, as can be seen on the back end). The 12V lead acid battery in the front is connected with the black and red wire to the power-supply (you can see the red and black wire also, on the far end of the picture). So the charger was already integrated into the PSU circuit back then, I'd say.
From a topological standpoint, I'd claim that this is pretty much the same thing as the microsoft-datacenter approach -- with the exception of running the powersupply with AC (except DC, as the current article seems to imply). Of course battery technology has improved in the meantime, and using LiIon would be just the smart thing to do now.
I Ctrl-F'd. I remember reading the Google article back in 2009. Wondered if they were going to mention it in this MS centric article, and was glad to see they did.
That's basically how the existing OCP server designs that Facebook contributed worked. The difference would seem to be that the previous OCP design put the battery pack together for adjacent racks at 48V instead of just one battery on each individual server.
