Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Has 1 Million Servers. So What?
itwbennett writes "The only thing that's noteworthy about Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's recent disclosure that the company has one million servers in its data centers is that he decided to disclose it — most of the industry giants like to keep that information to themselves, says ITworld's Nancy Gohring. But just for fun, Amazon Web Services engineer James Hamilton did the math: One million servers equals 15–30 data centers, a $4.25 billion capital expense, and power consumption of 2.6TWh annually, or the amount of power that would be used by 230,000 homes in the U.S. Whether this is high or low, good or bad is impossible to know without additional metrics."
or two.
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
And how much power is being wasted simply to keep the lights on and the disks spinning? Amazon realized this and started AWS, but they're not off the hook either.
How can they afford them ? Oh, wait .....
They have one million servers, but how many are running Linux?
Ballmer doesn't give details about how their servers are used but I would assume 90% of them are used to run Exchange for Microsoft. I kid! I kid! Probably most are used by Bing.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
everyone would cheer
Correct. Who cares...
He simply said "servers." Most of them could be VMs running on a much smaller number of hosts.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
So what is that is Linux Servers?
What, about 6... Maybe 7.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
and ms still can't write decent code!
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
MS is much bigger than the U.S. initiative if gov't reports are correct. The Utah Data Center only requires 65 Mw http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center.
*pinkie up against corner of mouth* "One MEEELLLEYION Servers!"
Ballmer kind of does look and act like a super-villain, doesn't he?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
MS is much bigger than the U.S. initiative if gov't reports are correct. The Utah Data Center only requires 65 Mw http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center.
Of course the Government can have a smaller initiative! Most of their stuff is hosed by MS, Google and Amazon!
They should move all that content to the Azure cloud and save space and money.
For all we know, I have 16 servers running on my desktop OS, and another 160 attached to my home network by his definition. The real question is what value does it bring to his customers, not the quantity of them.
So does anyone on /. actually contribute to a conversation anymore?
No wonder none of my coworkers come here anymore.
Just so they can display 1 frame of Vista UI.
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/492120/20130718/microsoft-takes-900-million-charge-surface-tablets.htm ...store of six million Surface tablets.
Perhaps they should install Android.
A while ago I was informed by an auditor that was assigned to work at Microsoft for a while that the NSA is partially funding the data-centers for Microsoft and have been doing so even before Microsoft had acquired them. That person did not tell me how much they were spending but they said it's enough for Microsoft to feel good about it.
Google has 4x the market share, so a back of the envelope calculation suggests that Google has 4M servers.
If they weren't using Windows on those million servers, they could do the job with about 600,000 servers instead.
servers... servers... servers... servers.. servers...
How much of those servers (if run Windows, at least) have applied the patches that are not yet available for the normal customers because they are still in the NSA exploit queue?
with only 500,000 concurrent connections
Since they do mail hosting that's probably half right and a large proportion of them are mail servers. It probably works well most of the time, but I've only ever been exposed to that side of their business due to an utterly stupid fuckup that took them a week to resolve because that's how long the trouble ticket queue is - that's how little respect they had for their client with more than twenty thousand email accounts. I wasn't working for that client of theirs but instead trying to contact someone there while their Microsoft hosted email was down for a week.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-ww-monthly-201206-201306 A quick look at market share put Google at 90%...with Bing at less than 4% at least in the search arena. So about 22 times larger.
In areas such as online email outlook.com has 420 million (18 February 2013) vs Gmail 425 million (June 2012) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook.com and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail ...which I would kindly call a draw.
For their Choosing a Cloud-Based Office Systems http://rcpmag.com/articles/2013/04/23/google-apps-vs-microsoft-office.aspx "In terms of user numbers, Google Apps had about 10 percent of the cloud-office market in 2007, 20 percent in 2009, and between 33 percent and 50 percent in 2012, according to Gartner's analysis." Which again I am going to kindly call it draw.
That is without looking at the servers for Google+; YouTube; Play and Maps where Microsoft does not have a product, or at All those Microsoft servers that deal with activation and updates...and a whole host mysterious information.
The bottom line though is that 4X market share is not right for anything.
If the servers ran Linux, maybe they'd only need 500,000 !!
I'd byte, but there's too much Glass from the broken Windows.
when i saw the word server I thought of a waiter or waitress who works in a restaurant. been watching the Food Network too much. lol
i was like, Microsoft owns restaurants?? huh?
For the benefit those of us who think that quoting power figures in units of A*Wh/B is just as stupid as using US customary units:
2.6TWh/year = 297 MW
One half exists just to supply updates to the other half.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Is there a way to get the NSA to disclose how many servers is has? Or Google for that matter? Sifting audio and video data for key words or copyrighted content must consume huge resources.
Ballmer: We have ONE MILLION servers!!!!! /Dr.Evilfinger
(Rest of the world laughs)
I attended the first ApacheCon in 1998. One of the top brass at Yahoo (founder? CEO?) spoke on open source software. I don't recall all the details, but I remember him saying that they had about 450 servers running BSD.
During the Q&A, someone asked what version of BSD they were running. As I recall he said that over half were running the latest, another 30% or so were on one version earlier, and the rest--15-20%--were on an older version. This caused a mummer from the audience, and an ASF panelist asked for elaboration.
Oh, replied they Yahooligan, why the old OS? Well it doesn't seem to make much sense to reboot a server that's run for over 18 months without a problem just to upgrade the OS.
At this point the president of the ASF, Brian Behlendorf, stepped to the mic and said, "Let's hear Microsoft say that ."
The crowd went wild (except for the two MS reps in front of me).
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
Does it run on Linux?
with high data usage for those on capped connections, lag, freezing and smeary visuals.
there OnLive Desktop service was a violation of the Windows 7 license agreement,
users must be located within 1,000 miles (1,600 km) of one of these to receive high-quality service.
The internet will need to get better for cloud to work and for some stuff the control lag can be a killer try cable vod add you see that your inputs take some time to work and that is ok for a movie but not for a game.
A million servers isn't cool
You know what's cool?
A billion servers. NOT.
Well ok: "So what?" Then, What do YOU have?? That would be my return question! Personally, I wish I could afford & fund that many machines - I'd LOVE to play with distributed cluster driven database programming with a million systems (multicore to the max, loaded with RAM, & nothing but SSD (with True SSD based on DDR2 RAM for paging)).
* I think 1 million of anything is a big number - I think it's cool for a little "factoid trivia" to know MS has this setup working for them...
APK
P.S.=> Face it: If you're "into computing", really, Really, REALLY into it & can apply yourself in it? 1 million server-class systems would be excellent to have @ your disposal - projects that take too long? No problem if they can be busted up in SOME way (most can), threaded, & distributed...
... apk
No one here seems to be realizing that this is completely about Azure. Microsoft has been moving very strongly into the IaaS and PaaS market with the various Azure offerings over the last 5 years, and it's totally clear that they are making this a huge part of their business going forward. This is why they are promoting the number of servers they have, because providing those resources to people on demand is how they will make a large part of their revenue going forward.
all those reports of 1.5 million Windows Servers actually running worldwide.
I just have to wonder who has the other half million?
Imagine the licensing cost to run 1M servers on MS Windows Server ($1k/CPU or something like that). They would save a lot of money switching to Linux!
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Yeah, UNIX is just that good and Windows Servers are never supposed to be tasked for more than 1 purpose... PDC - standalone, BDC - Standalone, Exchange Server - Standalone, SQL Server - Cluster, etc....
Can multipurpose, multi-app a UNIX box, before even starting to do things with Virtualization...
i don't think so!
... Microsoft rejects YOU!
Seriously, in 90-s in Russia FreeBSD was the system of choice of ISP. Not Linux, not Microsoft. And I have read that once upon a time in 90-s the FreeBSD FTP site took world's first place in total download. The second place was taken by Microsoft site.
Hardware difference was shocking: FreeBSD was a quite old single processor Pentium Pro. It was housed in 5 ATX boxes, 4 of them were filled with SCSI HDD. Microsoft site was a complex of more than 50 computers. So I believe that FreeBSD is more than 50 times more efficient than Microsoft OS, in condition that both OS are serviced by properly educated personnel.
Returning to this article, I believe that 980000 Microsoft servers just waste energy, space and personnel resources. It's enough energy for 225400 US homes.
do they run Linux?
Someone got to ask you know.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
MS has a million servers.
This is equivalent to, what, 100k Linux servers, or 50k BSD servers?
hawk, who remembers the hotmail attempted conversion from FreeBSD to Windows when MS bought it
they have to put all your data some place and as we all now know, the NSA has login accounts.
More specifically, it is 497 + N days, due to this defect: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2553549
Note that you can only request for hotfix. No patch for this defect will be applied through regular Windows Update.
I guess, now, people who know the number of servers at google are laughing hard at MS
I gave up with the idea of an useful sig...
There's a great talk by an engineer from Amazon, who shares some information about the retail website's migration over to EC2. For those who haven't used it, one of the nice features of EC2 is the ability to "autoscale" - when the load on a server fleet changes (as defined by automatically-gathered metrics such as CPU utilization or memory consumption), hosts can be automatically added or removed. This is useful to Amazon because the load on the site changes all the time. People shop more during the day, and few shop during the night. Many more people shop in the leadup to Christmas, and the rest of the year is relatively quiet.
I think the intersting part about it is the cultural change that's come from it. We like to come to these conferences and say "well, how big is your server fleet?". "Oh my god you run tens of thousands of servers, that has to be amazing!". At Amazon, we've sort of changed that dynamic. The rock stars of ops now are the people who figure out how to make fleets small, not the people who figure out how to make fleets big.
Ballmer is basically bragging about how big his company's server fleet is, and I think this shows that Microsoft's server infrastructure is still a little less mature than the more established Internet companies.
Bragging about how many servers you run is like bragging about how much memory your application consumes - it's nothing to be proud of.
If they ran VMware they could probably get that count down to 500,000-600,000 servers.
Can we put that on the end of all Slashdot headlines from now on?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It isn't unreasonable to presume their efficacy to be about on par with their usual "server" software. Which indeed means that their million is only worth ~300000 servers running other operating systems and server software.
A quick run around those million servers shows the most used app is the System Idle Process. Microsoft's marketing department is already looking at how it can rebrand and promote this awesome app. Research suggests Linux doesn't even have a System Idle Process, so Microsoft is hoping to capitalise on this in the constant battle of Windows vs. Linux.
I move the following off my wd Velociraptor sata II 10,000 rpm 16mb buffered harddisks that are driven off a Promise Ex-8350 128mb ECC ram caching raid sata 1/2 controller (which also lessens physical head movement on disks & this is where I am going to make it even faster via lessening its workloads, read on & reduces fragmentation as well in the same stroke - "bonus") onto my 4gb DDR2 Gigabyte IRAM PCIExpress ramdisk card:
A.) Pagefile.sys (partition #1 1gb size, rest is on 3gb partition next)
B.) OS & App level logging (EventLogs + App Logging)
C.) WebBrowser caches, histories, sessions & browsers too
D.) Print Spooling
E.) %Temp% ops (OS & user level temp ops environmental variable values alterations)
F.) %Tmp% ops (OS & user level temp ops environmental variable values alterations)
G.) %Comspec% (command interpreter location, cmd.exe in this case, & in DOS/Win9x years before, command.com also)
H.) Lastly - I also place my custom hosts file onto it, via redirecting where it's referenced by the OS, here in the registry (for performance AND security):
HKLM\system\CurrentControlSet\services\Tcpip\Parameters
(Specifically altering the "DataBasePath" parameter there which also acts more-or-less, like a *NIX shadow password system also!)
* All of which lessen the amount of work my "main" OS & programs slower mechanical hard disks have to do, "speeding them up" by lessening their workload, fragmentation, and speeding up access/seek latency for the things in the list above too.
APK
P.S.=> Thus, hdd's can concentrate on program &/or data fetches that are still hdd bound (& not kernelmode diskcaching subsystem cached in 4gb of DDR3 system ram here either yet), & being done on a media that has no heads to move, & thus, more mechanical latency + slower seek/access as you get on hard disks + reduced filesystem fragmentations due to that all, also (bonus!)... &, it works!
... apk
If a million servers (assuming that they're all real servers and not virtual servers) take the electricity of 230,000 homes in America, then that means that roughly each server uses a little less than 1/4 of the electricity of a home? My dryer, oven, water heater and TV are all laughing their asses off at this stupid statement.
Can't REALLY truly fully 'escape' it: Exes pageback to themselves.
* Which of course, that is WHY folks who disable paging on their machines (4gb or better types in system RAM onboard 32 or 64-bit OS notwithstanding) still see paging...
APK
P.S.=> It's not necessarily to the pagefile.sys is why or a temp one: It's due to the above fact! Had to add that "bit of trivia" factoid in above my last response to you on HOW I use RamDisk/RamDrive hardware not based on FLASH but rather DDR2 Ram, here -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3990261&cid=44327003 which you *may* find, "enlightening" hopefully... it works! apk
Those million servers support stupid development gambles like Windows 8. And continued Elvis moves to be government lacky #1. Hey lets all type with our thumbs now too oh wow! Blackberry failed, I guess quality tactile keyboards anywhere are out! Its the end of the PC oh my I guess that means its the end of mouse-driven desktop GUIs. You know those multi-desktop GUI features in Linux were damn cool, oh well I guess we'll never copy those types of features now! OMG da wisdom of it all OMG! Its a new era! My word is my bond even though they will drive this company into the dirt and bury it. Follow me, with haste, my yes-men, my lemmings!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I can't believe someone hasn't already said this.
Surely 640K servers should be enough for anybody.
*ducks.
Windoze being Windoze means it gets the least out of server hardware compared to other os such as flavours of Unix. It's no surprise that they need more hosts to achieve what they could achieve with a different os and less hardware. Hardly a shock and almost an admittance to how awful Windoze is.