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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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')
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.
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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.
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.
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!
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.
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.