Last night, I was invited by IEEE GOLD to speak at a cloud computing event they organized for their members. They wanted me to share with them about what Microsoft was doing in cloud computing.
(For those who don’t know, IEEE GOLD stands for Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Graduates Of Last Decade. That’s a long name!)
I didn’t know what to expect, since I was told the audience would be a mix of current students, graduated students, researchers, faculty, alumni and industry people. And being an IEEE event, it meant that most of the audience came from an electrical engineering background, instead of an IT background like the technical audiences we normally reach out to.
I mean, do electrical engineers really care about cloud computing?
Well, surprisingly (to me), yes!
As I sort of expected, the audience got the most excited when I spoke about the massive investment that Microsoft is putting into building data centers all around the world. I spoke about how Microsoft is using 4th-generation data center designs and cutting-edge technology allows Microsoft to achieve an average PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) of 1.22 in their data centers.
(As a reference, Google’s twelve-month energy-weighted average PUE is around 1.18. We are only a little bit behind. :))
And as expected, the PUE discussion triggered off a flurry of questions and further discussions around how PUE is measured and optimized in data centers. All in all it was a great night of conversation with a very passionate audience that was very engaged.
Here are the slides that I used for the presentation last night:
[slideshare id=4168237&doc=microsoftandthecloud-jonathanwong-100520005112-phpapp01]
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