Slashdot Mirror
Surveying the World of the Biggest Server Farms
1sockchuck writes "Rackspace said this week that it is managing more than 50,000 web servers, raising the question: who else has that many? Of companies that publicly discuss their server counts, there are only a handful that are near or above the 50,000 server mark, including 1&1 Internet, The Planet, and Akamai, as well as Rackspace. The larger totals are found among companies that don't discuss how many servers they're running. The leading suspects: Google, Microsoft, Amazon and eBay."
If you bother to RTFA you'll see it isn't a netcraft server count, but a mention in their SEC reported earnings something they are unlikely to just make up.
The comparisons are with netcraft numbers. And those netcraft numbers are explicitly not IP address counts and have rackspace as way under 50,000 (which you would expect since many machines wouldn't be web servers (database backends, mail servers, etc) and many would be firewalled to not allow public access.
MS has approximately 160,000. When I was there a year ago, I did a tour of one of their test datacenters... (even regular staff don't get to tour production), and they remarked that they'd recently turned on their 150,000th.
If this is to be believed, they salvage and rebuild as much as they can, and send the rest to recycling.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
Hello,
I have worked supporting Google's servers in one of my former employers data center. What I can tell you about there deployments is as follows:
1) 20,000 Servers in our data center; they occupied 8 other sites (~160,000 servers). Our site was one of the largest.
2) Over 30 GigE connections feeding into dual Juniper M20 later upgraded to Juniper T-320
3) Yes they run a custom version of RH
Now for the record; they had approx 160,000 servers in our companies data centers. I have met techs from other data centers which had similar counts. At a minimum I can confirm approx 160,000 and potentially 320,000 and up for other data centers; providing they mirrored their servers. It wouldn't make sense to put all your eggs (servers) in one basket. The time frame for these numbers was back in the early 2002.
Microsoft would have a total pile but since they can't even do SSL on their update sites they are running cheap and probably have less than 300k even with hotmail
The update protocol does winhttps (SSL). The actual file downloads are simple winhttp, since they are signed.
Ask, and ye shall receive...
US_realm_list_by_datacenter