The struggle in Ukraine and the resultant scarcity of pure fuel has pressured the European Union (EU) and European international locations to proactively put together for the opportunity of extra risky power provides—each this winter and past. Microsoft is working with clients, governments, and different stakeholders all through the area to convey readability, continuity, and compliance within the face of doable energy-saving methods on the native and nationwide degree. In solidarity with Europe, the place even important companies are more likely to be requested to search out power financial savings, we now have validated plans and contingencies in place to responsibly cut back power use in our operations throughout Europe, and we’ll achieve this in a method that minimizes danger to buyer workloads operating within the Microsoft Cloud.
We wish to share a number of the contingencies and mitigations that our groups have put in place to responsibly function our cloud companies.
Supporting grid stability by responsibly managing our power consumption
The energy that’s consumed by Microsoft from the utilities is primarily used to energy our community and servers, cooling programs, and different datacenter operations. We have contingency plans to contribute to power grid stability, whereas working to make sure minimal disruption to our clients and their workloads, together with:
- The scale and distribution of the Microsoft datacenters provides us the power to reposition non-regional platform as a service (PaaS) companies, inside infrastructure, and lots of of our inside non-customer analysis and improvement (R&D) workloads to different close by areas, whereas nonetheless assembly our information residency and EU Data Boundary commitments.
- Actively working with native governments and huge organizations to intently monitor and reply to energy consumption to make sure grid stability and minimal disruption to our clients’ vital workloads. We are working with native utility suppliers to make sure our programs are prepared for a variety of circumstances.
- Our datacenter areas are deliberate and constructed to resist grid emergencies. When wanted, we rapidly transition to backup energy sources to scale back impression on the grid with out impacting buyer workloads.
Resilient infrastructure funding
Microsoft is accountable for offering our clients with a resilient basis within the Microsoft Cloud—in how it’s designed, operated, and monitored to make sure availability. We make appreciable investments within the platform itself—bodily issues like our datacenters, in addition to software program issues like our deployment and upkeep processes.
We attempt to supply our cloud-using clients with “five-nines” of service availability, that means that the datacenter is operational 99.999 p.c of the time. However, understanding that service interruptions and failures occur for a myriad of causes, we construct programs designed with failure in thoughts.
We have Azure Availability Zones (AZs) in each nation by which we function datacenter areas. AZ’s are comprised of a minimal of three zone areas, every with unbiased energy, cooling and networking, permitting clients to unfold their infrastructure and purposes throughout discrete and dispersed datacenters for added resiliency and availability.
Battery backup and backup turbines are a further resiliency functionality we implement and are utilized throughout energy grid outages and different service interruptions so we are able to meet service ranges and operational reliability. We have contracted entry to further gas provides to take care of generator operations, and we additionally maintain vital spares to take care of generator well being. We are prepared to make use of backup turbines throughout Europe, when essential, to maintain our companies operating in case of a severe grid emergency.
Across our world infrastructure, it’s commonplace for us to work with a heightened operational consciousness, as a consequence of exterior components. For occasion, extreme winter climate occasions in Texas in 2021 induced substantial strain on the Texas power grid. Microsoft was in a position to take away its San Antonio datacenter from utilizing grid energy. Although Microsoft’s onsite substations had been designed with redundancy, we had been in a position to rapidly transition to our tertiary redundant programs—turbines. These programs saved the datacenters operating, with zero impression to our cloud clients, whereas the utility grid might guarantee residential houses stayed heat. During this occasion, we maintained one hundred pc uptime for our clients, whereas eradicating our workloads from the grid.
Resiliency suggestions for cloud architectures
This is a difficult time for organizations monitoring the rising power issues in Europe. We are offering essential infrastructure for the communities the place we function, and our clients are relying on us to present dependable cloud companies to run their vital workloads. We acknowledge the significance of continuity of service for our clients, together with these offering important companies: well being care suppliers, police and emergency responders, monetary establishments, producers of vital provides, grocery shops and well being companies. Organizations questioning what extra they’ll do to enhance the reliability of their purposes, or questioning how they’ll cut back their very own power consumption, can contemplate the next:
- Customers who’ve availed themselves of excessive availability instruments, together with geo-redundancy, ought to be unaffected by impacts to a single datacenter area. For software program as a service (SaaS) companies like Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Power Platform, the enterprise continuity and resiliency are managed by Microsoft. For Microsoft Azure, clients ought to all the time contemplate designing their Azure workloads with excessive availability in thoughts.
We all the time encourage clients to have a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plan in place as a part of the Microsoft Well-Architected Framework, which you’ll be able to learn extra about. Customers who wish to proactively migrate their Azure sources from one area to a different can achieve this at any time. Find out how.
- On-premises clients can cut back their very own power consumption by transferring their purposes, workloads, and databases to the cloud. The Microsoft Cloud might be as much as 93 p.c extra power environment friendly than conventional enterprise datacenters, relying on the precise comparability being made. Discover extra right here. Start your sustainability journey as we speak.
- Energy use in our datacenters is pushed by buyer use. Customers can play a component in lowering power consumption by following inexperienced software program improvement pointers, together with shutting down unused server situations, and sustainable software design. Further info obtainable right here.
We proceed to enhance the power effectivity of our datacenters, in our ongoing dedication to make our world infrastructure extra sustainable and environment friendly. As international locations and power suppliers contemplate choices to scale back their consumption of electrical energy within the occasion of an power capability scarcity, we’re working with grid operators on this evolving state of affairs. With the dimensions, experience, and partnerships that we function, we’re assured that our danger mitigation actions will offset any potential disruption to our clients operating their vital workloads within the cloud.