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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."
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
They're using Netcraft to prove their server count - which reports on IP addresses. Just because there are 50,000 IP addresses responding to port 80, doesn't mean they have 50,000 boxes. The shared hosting arrangements can easily have dozens and dozens of "servers" operating on the same physical box.
Yes, it's still impressive... but not as impressive as it would first appear.
-- "Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?"
50,000 -- that's peanuts compared to the likes of Google or Yahoo etc... Here's a short article on the data center that Google is building (has built??) in Oregon.. http://harpers.org/media/slideshow/annot/2008-03/index.html
Seems to me the second largest search engine likely has 50k servers or more..
MABASPLOOM!
I'm sure some big porn websites(those that regroup many websites together especially) have quite a lot of servers...
Netcraft has developed a technique for identifying the number of computers (rather than IP addresses) acting as web servers on the internet, and attributes these computers to hosting locations through reverse DNS lookups."
Apparently it's not just the number of webservers (just IP addresses), but the number of physical boxes these guys are running. If Netcraft's technique is valid, then it could be helpful in determining the 'true' penetration of FOSS based server installs on the Internet. This could severely impact the ranking of sites that are hosted on certain proprietary OSes.
Sig this!
Uh, MS doesn't do HTTPS on their update site because they do PKI signing on the update package themselves so they don't need to.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Are you trying to show who has the biggest dick in the IT world ? :3
No, didn't you read the summary? We're trying to find out who has the biggest rack.
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.
Thats right, me. In fact I just set up #50,001. You'll never guess what I'm doing with them either.
Do you really need that much porn?
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
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.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
he's got an 8-screen setup
... Google how many servers it uses, does that mean it's self-aware?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I'm pretty sure the hosting company I had a few years ago (aka "kiddie hosting") had that many customers on the server that I was on. Does that count?
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
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.
And you seriously think that Google (or any other bigger company) is still using 2-CPU servers?
There's an octo-mom joke in there somewhere.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
I imagine there is a fairly large server farm somewhere near Ft. Meade, MD.
[Insert pithy quote here]
...maybe if it said "eight-head" setup?
sorry for the second reply but according to the homepage ( http://www.1und1.com/ [in German]) the company has over 7.2 million customers in Germany, UK, France, Spain, Austria and the USA running on more than 55k servers.