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.
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.
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
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.
... 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)
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