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Surveying the World of the Biggest Server Farms

Posted by timothy on from the don't-forget-the-various-tlas dept.

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."

8 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Shouldn't it be easy to figure out? by afidel · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Figure servers per sq ft and add up their total datacenter sq footage. Googles a bit harder due to changing strategy over their current server lines but a good guesstimate shouldn't be too hard.

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    1. Re:Shouldn't it be easy to figure out? by afidel · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Should still get you in the right ballpark, few companies are going to waste huge amounts of money building empty datacenters =)

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      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
    2. Re:Shouldn't it be easy to figure out? by 0x15 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Many of the production data centers I've worked on have been using VMs for web servers for quite some time (e.g. ESX 2.x). That includes one of the companies that is on the list of unknowns in the article. I'm surprised it wasn't addressed and that so many jumped to a physical server conclusion. However, even if the 50k servers are all VMs, that's a major management load. 50k of just about any configuration item takes some work.

    3. Re:Shouldn't it be easy to figure out? by Gorobei · · Score: 4, Interesting

      A lot of datacenters get built in repurposed buildings - the square-footage is often misleading (some are even 60's era compute farm housing - 90% of the space may be unused.)

      For low-latency datacenters, you build in the middle of cities. Then you find square-footage really doesn't cover it: the fire-marshall shows up and red-tags you because he doesn't want a six mega-watt dense power sink in the middle of his premium real-estate.

    4. Re:Shouldn't it be easy to figure out? by hardwarefreak · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Also hopefully they are not counting virtual machines here.
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      Slow Poke

      It's almost guaranteed that they are talking virtual servers as well as some bare metal. Rackspace is talking about the 50,000 web servers that *THEY* manage--i.e. managed services. This figure likely doesn't include the thousands of rented colo machines which their customers manage themselves. The latter was Rackspace's first business model, a pure colo. It wasn't until relatively recently that they started offering managed services. It may very very turn out that the 50,000 server figure is the entire sum total of physical servers on their network.

  2. Re:50,000 web servers, not physical servers by ZosX · · Score: 2, Interesting

    4 years ago. I wonder if all those boxes are still running right now? I wonder what google does when it retires servers.....it would be kind of cool to have a couple of bonafide google racks doing something cool at my house.

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  3. Financial Services Industry by Chris+Snook · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Most of them won't go into detail, but Wall Street firms have immense server farms. Some of them are limited in size by the amount of electricity the New York City power grid can supply them. They also have huge data centers in less prime real estate, but microseconds are dollars in the financial markets, so they try to keep as many of their systems as close to the action as possible. There are entire floors of NYC skyscrapers full of racks modeling the financial markets in real time, conducting transactions, and crunching numbers for human analysts.

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  4. 2 CPU servers are a joke by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Companies that have "real" computers - 32-cpus and more and have 10,000 of those are more impressive to me. Having 100,000 servers, all the same, is impressive, but still will use about the same management as 10,000 servers would.

    I've deployed (3) 48-way servers with 2 for HA Oracle DBs and the other for DR and testing. Oracle RAC was the best in class at the time - grid didn't exist. I've deployed hundreds of custom servers (diff OS with diff required patches) running specialized applications from many, many vendors. Getting an application from SAIC or Telcordia or Teradata to work inside your normal infrastructure is harder than it sounds. Even for huge customers, they barely bend without huge payments and there usually isn't any competitive alternative.

    Some workloads aren't worth hunting/designing ways to split up. Get over it and buy the big servers.

    MS runs 160,000 servers? If they converted to Linux, that could easily be reduced to 10,000. ;)