In his Rough Type blog, Nicholas Carr — contrarian author of the book, Does IT Matter? — comments on Microsoft’s plans to build a data center in Siberia and upcoming completion of the world’s largest data center in Chicago. Construction of these facilities costs hundreds of millions of dollars, and each will hold tends of thousands of servers. Microsoft’s Chicago data center will employ only 35 to 50 people. Apparently, climate in Chicago and Siberia were prominent in these sites being selected because their colder weather makes it cheaper to cool the data center equipment. Large server farms built for environmental efficiency and staffed by just a few people — is green physical and virtual platform design a new frontier for Design for Six Sigma? Microsoft is a big proponent of Lean Six Sigma.

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