Behind the scenes of the Belgium datacenter region

Recently we announced a new datacenter region in Belgium, as part of our Digital AmBEtion program, a multiyear investment program designed to accelerate the digital transformation of Belgium’s public and private sectors. Following our press conference, I took the attendees on a short tour behind the scenes tour of a Microsoft datacenter region. In this post, I will share the highlights.

If you missed our announcement, you can familiarize yourself with our announcements in following video.

Cloud computing is often talked about as a mythical piece of technology in the sky. It makes sure you can do mobile banking, stream videos, buy train tickets or be able to manufacture, ship and sell your products. But cloud needs to be somewhere.

Our Belgian datacenter region will be in the heart of Belgium and Europe, sized to the needs of Belgian organizations, companies, and governments.

Having a datacenter region in Belgium not only provides data residency in-country; it also enables new types of innovation that require fast access to the cloud. Think about smart cities, autonomous mobility solutions and beyond. The Belgian datacenter region expands Microsoft’s global hyperscale cloud infrastructure to Belgium.

Connectivity

With more than 60 datacenter regions, the Microsoft Cloud is already the largest cloud network on our planet, and possibly the universe.

To interconnect these datacenter regions, we rely on our own private fiber cables. We have more than 165.000 km of private fiber connecting our datacenter regions; enough to circle the planet more than 4 times.

And for the most remote locations on earth or even in space, we offer satellite connectivity directly into our datacenters.

This network is the backbone of the Microsoft cloud. Knowing this is a private network, it means that Microsoft must lay its own physical foundation for that backbone.

An example of this is MAREA, a 6600 km long cross Atlantic submarine fiber cable, built by Microsoft and partners, connecting Bilbao, Spain with Virginia in the United States. It’s one of the highest-capacity submarine cables in the world, originally transmitting 160 terabits/second, before it was upgraded to 200 terabits/second. This translates into more than 3500 hours of streaming video in 4K quality, per second!

Availability Zones

Let’s go back to Belgium. You hear us consistently talking about a datacenter region. That is because we don’t build a single data center, but a series of 3 so-called ‘Availability Zones’, each consisting out of one or more data center buildings.

Availability Zones make sure that applications continue to run, even in case of a datacenter outage. Each zone is strategically placed in the region, taking into consideration more than 30 viability criteria and risk factors. Every zone has its own energy connection, networking and water supply. This means your favorite mobile game or your trusted banking app continues to function, even in the unlikely event that a fire, or flood would hit one or even 2 of the 3 zones. The zones have a latency perimeter of less than 2 milliseconds between them allowing for a flawless failover. A user wouldn’t even notice it.

Organizations using our cloud can even go further and use one or more of the other 60 datacenter regions worldwide for added risk mitigation or just to be close to their customers in other countries.

Servers, servers, servers

If you would walk into a datacenter building in one of these availability zones, after stringent security checks, you would be met with aisles of servers, or server blades as we call them.

These are supported by an industrial grade electricity, cooling and mechanical infrastructure.

Although we try to operate as energy efficient as possible, these servers still need electricity. Our datacenters will take medium voltage, up to 10.000 Volt, from the electricity grid.

When you would take a server blade out of one of the racks in a datacenter, something only a certified engineer is allowed to do, you would see this.

These servers are designed by Microsoft, but we have open-sourced the design as part of the Open Compute Project. This allows every hardware manufacturer to manufacture according to our specifications, allowing for a steady supply of servers.

Around the globe, Microsoft has more than 4 million of these servers running in our datacenters. And we need many more!

Building trust

Of course, you can’t talk about hyperscale cloud datacenters, fiber networks and servers without talking about customer data.

Data privacy and security is our number one priority at Microsoft. Going from physical security of our datacenter facilities and infrastructure to logical data security with encryption of data on disks and innovations like confidential computing where data remains always encrypted.

Each day, and this is in my opinion one of the biggest benefits of using a hyperscale cloud, we analyze over 24 trillion signals across email, endpoints, and identities and translate this intelligence into innovative features to protect our customers. We have prevented more than 70 billion attacks over the past year alone.

With confidential computing we take protecting your data to the next level. Confidential computing technology encrypts data in memory and only processes it once the cloud environment is verified, preventing data access from cloud operators, malicious admins, and privileged software. This helps organizations meet their ever-increasing privacy and security needs. As our Azure CTO Mark Russinovich explains in the linked blog post, our vision is to transform the Azure cloud into the Azure confidential cloud, moving from computing in the clear to computing confidentially across the cloud and edge.

Our sustainability commitments

The hardware in our datacenters doesn’t stay there forever. Sometimes equipment like data carriers fail or technology has advanced making them outdated. This means the hardware must be removed and sent out for recycling.

We don’t take that task lightly. First, after digitally erasing disks, we make them pass through a dry shredder before they can leave the datacenter building. Once a data carrier has entered the server room, it can only leave the datacenter in this state.

But we won’t just throw those shredded disks away. We have committed to achieve a zero-waste certification for our data centers, which means that at least 90% of waste needs to be reused or recycled.

Our sustainability commitment goes beyond the circular waste management.

Although our datacenter region in Belgium will be very energy efficient compared to traditional datacenters it will replace or make obsolete, Microsoft realizes the impact that technology has on energy consumption.

As part of our carbon and energy commitments we have the ambition to be carbon negative by 2030 and remove our historical carbon emissions by 2050. This through green, renewable energy resources and investment in carbon removal. We have also recently announced the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, helping our customers to record, report, and reduce emissions.

Our datacenters need to keep running, even if the electricity grid goes down. That’s why our datacenters are equipped with generators, making sure that the users of our cloud services are not impacted by an electricity outage.

At the moment we’re using the most advanced diesel generators for this. With our commitment to run our datacenters diesel free by 2030 we’re heavily investing in green hydrogen and exploring the options for advanced fuel cells.

If you want to explore more about our datacenters, I highly recommend our interactive Virtual Datacenter Tour.

I’m looking forward to the realization of our Digital AmBEtion. With the announcement of our datacenter region, we offer Belgian organizations local data residency and faster access to the cloud in a secure and sustainable way. Over the coming months we will share more on the progress of our plans!