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

How do you calculate space and power...

[msauve]

He simply said "servers." Most of them could be VMs running on a much smaller number of hosts.

Re:How do you calculate space and power...

[dbIII]

And people wonder why we consider some management to be utter clowns not worth the oxygen? Both people that negotiated that mess would probably make a greater contribution to the world if they were introduced into the food chain instead of running large organisations. The replacements should then be chosen on merit instead of family connections or drinking buddies.

Re:How much of that information is useful

[UnknowingFool]

I would assume that most of the servers are probably doing web crawls for Bing so they are working most of the time. Now I don't know if MS has heavily optimized their hardware like Google did for efficiency.

wtf?

[JediJorgie]

So does anyone on /. actually contribute to a conversation anymore?

No wonder none of my coworkers come here anymore.

Re:How much of that information is useful

[NotQuiteReal]

Cross-check:

2.6E12 Wh / 230,000 = 11M Wh per house.

11 Mwh = 11,000 KWh, and that is about 20 cents per, (actually tiered from 10-30c). Or $2200, or about $183 a month, which is a pretty fair estimate, for my bill.

And, yes, a couple of years ago when I retired a (work related) server I no longer needed, my electric bill did go down by about $35/month - which is also in the ball park for "4-ish servers" = a household worth of electricity.