According to Microsoft, its $550 million Chicago data center is one of the largest data centers in the world to make use of shipping containers, and Phase one of the data center opened on Wednesday. The idea of running servers inside a standard shipping container is a relatively new one. In short, the container arrives from the manufacturer with around 2,000 ready to run machines, and goes straight from the delivery truck to the data center floor. In as little as 8 hours, the new servers can be online.

"The online world is unpredictable. With new feature sets coming out continually, new products we haven't even thought of, we have to make these investments scale beyond what we know of today," says Kevin Timmons, general manager of Microsoft data center operations. "A big part of our job is to provide the business with options."

Microsoft is playing catch-up to Google in the server space and in addition to the newly opened Chicago data center, the Redmond company also celebrated the grand opening of its "chiller-free" Dublin data center. It also has data centers in Quincy, WA and San Antonio.

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