Microsoft

With the prices of flash storage coming down fast to meet a kind of parity with disk storage, and solid state memory having obvious throughput and energy savings benefits compared to spinning rust, you might think that disk drives would be pretty much dead out there on the public clouds. …

In yet another example of how distributed systems sometimes work better than centralized ones, the hardware engineers at Microsoft have come up with a new battery-backed power supply for their homegrown servers that allows for massive – and expensive – battery rooms to be eliminated from the cloud giant’s datacenters. …