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."

Comments

and every one of them has an NSA back door.

[quonsar]

or two.

Re:and every one of them has an NSA back door.

[ArcadeMan]

But... virtual servers use virtual electricity, not real electricity!

What cost the MS License fees ... ?

[Alain Williams]

How can they afford them ? Oh, wait .....

Re:What cost the MS License fees ... ?

[colinrichardday]

Because they're still running?

Breakdown?

[UnknowingFool]

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.

Re:How much of that information is useful

[cold fjord]

I doubt they are as highly optimized as Google's server. I'm pretty sure Balmer would object if they were loaded with Linux or *BSD.

Re:Homage

[roc97007]

But without the class.

Re:Microsoft

[Mike Frett]

I'd byte, but there's too much Glass from the broken Windows.

Only 50% are customer-facing

[sootman]

One half exists just to supply updates to the other half.

server comparison (BSD vs Micro$loth)

[JThaddeus]

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).

Re:How much of that information is useful

[Shark]

I wonder how many of those run the Access database that powers their HR/Payroll, surely they've outgrown Excel by now ;)

(Yeah, it's a troll, but I'm amused so there.)

Hope they aren't running Windows

[guruevi]

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!

But...

[flyingfsck]

do they run Linux?

Someone got to ask you know.

So what indeed

[wonkey_monkey]

Can we put that on the end of all Slashdot headlines from now on?