How a Battery Cut Microsoft Datacenter Costs by a Quarter

Here's an image of a "google server" from 2009: http://www.altenergystocks.com/archives/2009/04/leadacid_bat... The innovation that google made was to first run the mainboards with +12V only, generating all other rails on the mainboard from this supply (that's why only yellow wires are going from the PSU to the mainboard, as can be seen on the back end). The 12V lead acid battery in the front is connected with the black and red wire to the power-supply (you can see the red and black wire also, on the far end of the picture). So the charger was already integrated into the PSU circuit back then, I'd say.

From a topological standpoint, I'd claim that this is pretty much the same thing as the microsoft-datacenter approach -- with the exception of running the powersupply with AC (except DC, as the current article seems to imply). Of course battery technology has improved in the meantime, and using LiIon would be just the smart thing to do now.

I am fortunate that I spent a few years in the platforms group and got a good look at how Google did what they did, and with that perspective have watched ideas in data center design emerge and flow. As the article points out Google does publish interesting bits of data, which lead to certain conclusions. And many of the same things that drove Google to do what it did, become the more likely answer when you own the entire data center (or better yet build it from scratch). I sat through a presentation of the big Ebay data center project in Utah and noted how they were coming up with the same answers to some of the same problems.

Because of that I doubt any one person is largely responsible there. There seems to have been a lot of cross pollination.

But hypothetically, APC could make an ATX UPS today that would be compatible with most ATX motherboards and leverage most of their existing software and drivers to do so.