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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."
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?"
I'm sure some big porn websites(those that regroup many websites together especially) have quite a lot of servers...
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.
That's going to come up with some off numbers.
There are oddities in there. Like, Google has some decent square footage with QTS in Atlanta.
Is the number, the number of machines in house, or the number of machines managed by the company in house? Places like Equinix have huge facilities, but they don't manage them (except for helping hands support).
Just because a company takes a bigger footprint, does that make them bigger? My old place had an Alexa rank in the top 300, but the main sites were served from maybe 24 machines set up for well over 10 million users/day, not including hot spares and ancillary equipment (DNS, mail, etc). That was unique users, not requests or page views. :)
I know Quantcast has a huge footprint, but they're in someone elses facility. I think it was only one of a few DC's that they're in. I didn't know it was their equipment until I talked to one of their techs. It was a very nice setup. The conversation with my coworkers went "I want to set our stuff up like theirs. Too bad we have dissimilar equipment, it'll never look so good."
Depending on who you're looking at, the footprint isn't the front end either. Places like Google, Quantcast, and many others have a LOT of non-public equipment for doing the fun stuff. Like Google has a slew of spiders crawling, analyzing, etc. It's perfectly likely the could (not necessarily do) get away with just a few dozen front end machines for Google.com, and pass the work off to back end machines.
It's all in the strategy that they use. If you're a multibillion dollar operation, do you squeeze every bit of power you have out of a machine, or stay real low and spread it across many? For my old place, I set up to squeeze everything I could out of them, and then spread out across machines so we could lose machines (hardware failures usually) without hurting the site. We didn't have the budget (the bosses liked the profit), but if I had really wanted, I could have probably spread it across thousands of machines. It just makes for headaches and larger IT staffs to keep up with it.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also hopefully they are not counting virtual machines here.
--
Slow Poke
There's an octo-mom joke in there somewhere.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Ask, and ye shall receive...
US_realm_list_by_datacenter
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.