The struggle in Ukraine and the resultant scarcity of pure fuel has compelled the European Union (EU) and European international locations to proactively put together for the potential of extra risky vitality provides—each this winter and past. Microsoft is working with prospects, governments, and different stakeholders all through the area to deliver readability, continuity, and compliance within the face of doable energy-saving methods on the native and nationwide stage. In solidarity with Europe, the place even important providers are more likely to be requested to search out vitality financial savings, we’ve got validated plans and contingencies in place to responsibly scale back vitality use in our operations throughout Europe, and we are going to accomplish that in a means that minimizes threat to buyer workloads working within the Microsoft Cloud.
We need to share a number of the contingencies and mitigations that our groups have put in place to responsibly function our cloud providers.
Supporting grid stability by responsibly managing our vitality consumption
The facility that’s consumed by Microsoft from the utilities is primarily used to energy our community and servers, cooling programs, and different datacenter operations. We’ve got contingency plans to contribute to vitality grid stability, whereas working to make sure minimal disruption to our prospects and their workloads, together with:
- The size and distribution of the Microsoft datacenters provides us the flexibility to reposition non-regional platform as a service (PaaS) providers, inner infrastructure, and plenty of of our inner non-customer analysis and growth (R&D) workloads to different close by areas, whereas nonetheless assembly our knowledge residency and EU Information Boundary commitments.
- Actively working with native governments and huge organizations to carefully monitor and reply to energy consumption to make sure grid stability and minimal disruption to our prospects’ important workloads. We’re working with native utility suppliers to make sure our programs are prepared for a spread of circumstances.
- Our datacenter areas are deliberate and constructed to resist grid emergencies. When wanted, we shortly transition to backup energy sources to scale back affect on the grid with out impacting buyer workloads.
Resilient infrastructure funding
Microsoft is answerable for offering our prospects 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 offer our cloud-using prospects with “five-nines” of service availability, which means that the datacenter is operational 99.999 p.c of the time. Nonetheless, understanding that service interruptions and failures occur for a myriad of causes, we construct programs designed with failure in thoughts.
We’ve got Azure Availability Zones (AZs) in each nation through which we function datacenter areas. AZ’s are comprised of a minimal of three zone areas, every with impartial energy, cooling and networking, permitting prospects to unfold their infrastructure and functions 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 will meet service ranges and operational reliability. We’ve got contracted entry to extra gas provides to keep up generator operations, and we additionally maintain important spares to keep up generator well being. We’re prepared to make use of backup turbines throughout Europe, when mandatory, to maintain our providers working in case of a severe grid emergency.
Throughout our international infrastructure, it’s common for us to work with a heightened operational consciousness, attributable to exterior elements. As an example, extreme winter climate occasions in Texas in 2021 induced substantial strain on the Texas vitality grid. Microsoft was in a position to take away its San Antonio datacenter from utilizing grid energy. Though Microsoft’s onsite substations had been designed with redundancy, we had been in a position to shortly transition to our tertiary redundant programs—turbines. These programs stored the datacenters working, with zero affect to our cloud prospects, whereas the utility grid might guarantee residential houses stayed heat. Throughout this occasion, we maintained one hundred pc uptime for our prospects, whereas eradicating our workloads from the grid.
Resiliency suggestions for cloud architectures
It is a difficult time for organizations monitoring the rising vitality issues in Europe. We’re offering necessary infrastructure for the communities the place we function, and our prospects are relying on us to present dependable cloud providers to run their important workloads. We acknowledge the significance of continuity of service for our prospects, together with these offering important providers: well being care suppliers, police and emergency responders, monetary establishments, producers of important provides, grocery shops and well being businesses. Organizations questioning what extra they will do to enhance the reliability of their functions, or questioning how they will scale back their very own vitality consumption, can take into account the next:
- Prospects who’ve availed themselves of excessive availability instruments, together with geo-redundancy, must be unaffected by impacts to a single datacenter area. For software program as a service (SaaS) providers like Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Energy Platform, the enterprise continuity and resiliency are managed by Microsoft. For Microsoft Azure, prospects ought to at all times take into account designing their Azure workloads with excessive availability in thoughts.
We at all times encourage prospects to have a Enterprise Continuity and Catastrophe Restoration (BCDR) plan in place as a part of the Microsoft Properly-Architected Framework, which you’ll learn extra about. Prospects who need to proactively migrate their Azure sources from one area to a different can accomplish that at any time. Learn how.
- On-premises prospects can scale back their very own vitality consumption by transferring their functions, workloads, and databases to the cloud. The Microsoft Cloud might be as much as 93 p.c extra vitality environment friendly than conventional enterprise datacenters, relying on the precise comparability being made. Uncover extra right here. Begin your sustainability journey right now.
- Vitality use in our datacenters is pushed by buyer use. Prospects can play a component in lowering vitality consumption by following inexperienced software program growth pointers, together with shutting down unused server cases, and sustainable software design. Additional data out there right here.
We proceed to enhance the vitality effectivity of our datacenters, in our ongoing dedication to make our international infrastructure extra sustainable and environment friendly. As international locations and vitality suppliers take into account choices to scale back their consumption of electrical energy within the occasion of an vitality capability scarcity, we’re working with grid operators on this evolving scenario. With the dimensions, experience, and partnerships that we function, we’re assured that our threat mitigation actions will offset any potential disruption to our prospects working their important workloads within the cloud.
