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Microsoft Has 1 Million Servers. So What?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the one-megaserver dept.

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."

4 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How much of that information is useful by viperidaenz · · Score: 3, Informative

    That's around 30kWh per day. My house is currently consuming 40kWh, but its the middle of winter here and my wife and son probably have the heater on.

  2. How about correctly reporting Market share by tuppe666 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Re: How much of that information is useful by alen · · Score: 4, Informative

    Servers run 24 7
    Peons turn the lights off most of the day

  4. The maximum uptime for Windows is ~17 months by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.