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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."

3 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Re:analogy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  2. 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.

    --
    There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
  3. Google Data Center Tech by Anonymous Coward · · 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.