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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."

5 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. One Million ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    They have one million servers, but how many are running Linux?

  2. Re:How much of that information is useful by amicusNYCL · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wonder about this:

    One million servers equals ... power consumption of 2.6TWh annually, or the amount of power that would be used by 230,000 homes in the U.S.

    So 1 home uses as much power as 4 servers? Are we talking about super high-powered servers, or really low-powered homes?

    --
    "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
  3. Re:How do you calculate space and power... by cusco · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Not really. Microsoft's Quincy data center started virtualizing servers and they saved so much electricity that they didn't hit Bonneville Power Association's target energy usage to qualify for the huge discount they normally get. To make up the difference they opened all the vents in the middle of winter, turned the heaters on full blast, and burned $70,000 in electricity in a week. The renegotiated the next year's contract with the BPA so they haven't had to repeat that particular bit of foolishness.

    --
    "Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
  4. Re:How much of that information is useful by Anubis+IV · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They've already said that they'll have 300,000 servers backing the various services for the Xbox One. Having another 700,000 on stuff like Bing, Outlook.com (née Hotmail), and their various stores (music, video, apps, etc.) doesn't seem unreasonable, though it's hard to say if it's a good use of that many, since I have no sense of what's appropriate when we're talking about this sort of scale.

  5. Re:and every one of them has an NSA back door. by rrhal · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'd be willing to bet he's counting virtual servers as servers.

    --
    All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain