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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.
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
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
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.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
*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.
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.
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
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.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
So does anyone on /. actually contribute to a conversation anymore?
No wonder none of my coworkers come here anymore.
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.
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?
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 !!
Servers run 24 7
Peons turn the lights off most of the day
I'd byte, but there's too much Glass from the broken Windows.
Looks like Google has just as many servers. As you said, Google's are optimized.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
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.
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.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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
Apparently neither can anyone else. When I started down the software engineering trail I was taught by some people (mostly men but some seriously intense women too) who happened to take programming extremely seriously. Zero defect was the gold standard. Hell, the only standard. If you couldn't do that, you really needed to be in another line of work. Lives were on the line and if you fucked up, someone, may a lot of someones, will die. Now we have EULA's that swear up and down that using any given product in such an environment, you are breaking the agreement. I've worked in nuclear, military, & medicine sooo.. Nice out there you deep pockets you. Sorry, failure wasn't an option in my line of work. Seriously. Aside from the fact that software engineering was something I did in my downtime, my life, the lives of people I knew, and untold other lives depended on zero defects. And if I fucked up, blaming it on Microsoft, Intel, IBM, or any other company wasn't an option.
/rant - for now.
Again, my life literally was in my own hands. As in "life in prison." No one has ever found a security hole or a defect yet in 20+ years and I didn't write small, single function applications. Blaming MS for not writing good code is really blaming a whole system that turns out barely usable code with the only safety being that if you fuck up, it's your fault using it whatever in some EULA excluded environment. And as for you, betcha you've got exclusions on the use of your code as well.
Physician - Heal thyself. Or better yet, he who is without sin, throw the first stone. This is my stone.
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
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.
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')
Are all the servers in the Microsoft data centre purely physical or are most of the servers actually virtualized and therefore not consuming much electrical power on an individual basis?
A server is a server. You can run as many VM's as you want on a server, but every VM exists on a real, physical, rack-mounted, power-consuming server.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
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.
It would be nice if software engineering were practiced as a real engineering discipline. I suspect that the cost of bugs is not being quantified correctly or else people would demand and pay for quality. A similar situation exists in security. People aren't willing to take proper measures because the consequences of failure aren't immediate.
Plan My Week for iPhone
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.)
Mind the frickin' laser...
A server is a server. You can run as many VM's as you want on a server, but every VM exists on a real, physical, rack-mounted, power-consuming server.
I have let's say 4 VM servers, residing on a single physical box. Is that 1, 4, or 5 'servers'?
I'm pretty sure Balmer would object if they were loaded with Linux or *BSD.
Well MS can afford a million windows servers because they don't have to pay the licensing for the OS.
And surely getting MS windows for free is better than getting linux for free - cause any chump can get linux for free... Right?
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
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 ($1k/CPU or something like that). They would save a lot of money switching to Linux!
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... Microsoft rejects YOU!
Seriously, in 90-s in Russia FreeBSD was the system of choice of ISP. Not Linux, not Microsoft. And I have read that once upon a time in 90-s the FreeBSD FTP site took world's first place in total download. The second place was taken by Microsoft site.
Hardware difference was shocking: FreeBSD was a quite old single processor Pentium Pro. It was housed in 5 ATX boxes, 4 of them were filled with SCSI HDD. Microsoft site was a complex of more than 50 computers. So I believe that FreeBSD is more than 50 times more efficient than Microsoft OS, in condition that both OS are serviced by properly educated personnel.
Returning to this article, I believe that 980000 Microsoft servers just waste energy, space and personnel resources. It's enough energy for 225400 US homes.
Let us calculate. I have no idea about US homes but I pay for apartment in Siberia where live my, say, cousins. I pay about 200 Roubles a month (about US$ 6.25 - US$ is about 32 Roubles). Tariff is 0.72 Roubles per kWh (about US$ 0.0225 per kWh). It amounts to 0.37 kW of average power consumption.
In comparison, PS of my computer is rated to 0.75 kW, and TDP of it's processor is 0.125 kW.
They cannot be cool. If "cool" means low temperature, then almost every computer I ever was able to test was cooler under FreeBSD than under Windows. The only notable exception was HP notebook with 2 video cards that was impossible to deactivate under X.
If the servers make something useful, then they also cannot be cool since cool means idle.
If "cool" means outstanding, then I believe that the only Microsoft thing that doesn't suck is a vacuum cleaner.
People use Bing. Just not willingly. EX: Windows is Binged. Verizon used to Bing their Android phones. IE is Binged. Siri is Binged. Now Windows 8.1 is Binged too, so it should ZOOM to the top of the charts right?
Bing is a verb that means "forcing an unwanted and inadequate search engine". Binged is the past tense of this word as well as the verb "consumed too many intoxicants".
So Binged may mean to have been forced to consumed too many intoxicants and search for things. It is the frat party of search engines - you use it, but don't know what you did or why you did during the Scavenger Hunt. If you're lucky you don't wake up in the quad in your underpants. This may explain its video search focus on porn. Or maybe the Bing admins just really, really like porn - the most obscure bizarre fetish porn available online apparently, not some mainstream softcore porn.
I'm not a prude: "the Internet is for porn" and the rest of it is en-passant. But the stuff you get from Bing video search is fringe erotica catering to a distinct class of extreme fetish I'm not so enamored with. If that's your thing, fine, but I think I'll let my kids Google with SafeSearch instead.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
One. And BTW, that's not a big load for a modern laptop.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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
If we are talking about 1 million Linux virtual hosts with 1GB RAM at classic 2% average loads then that would be about 3,000 BL460 Gen 8 with max RDIMM ram (384GB and 16 cores/32 threads each can support an average of up to 10% load for 1,000 virtual hosts), or 52 racks. If the virtual hosts need 512MB then, 27 racks. If you want to go to the edge and not overprovision 5x like a responsible person would and use LRDIMM, 6 racks. That's not a global network of datacenters. It's a data closet.
I think they're talking about physical, not virtual servers. And they're dealing with legacy tech.
Of course with a 2,000 to 1 ratio of physical servers to virtual servers the question becomes: why does Microsoft need more than one virtual server for every human who has Internet access? We don't even use Bing. I'm guessing the answer has something to do with backend processing and the NSA.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
And the bing web crawler is extremely inefficient, i had to block it from accessing several of my sites because it was bombarding them with enough requests to cause a continuous 20mbps stream of traffic.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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...
Can we put that on the end of all Slashdot headlines from now on?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
Current estimates are that Google has about 2 million servers.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Well MS can afford a million windows servers because they don't have to pay the licensing for the OS.
Licensing fees is a tiny cost compared to the ongoing expense of maintaining MS servers.
Depends on both the virtual servers, and the laptop.
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