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

and every one of them has an NSA back door.

[quonsar]

or two.

Re:and every one of them has an NSA back door.

[rrhal]

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

Re:and every one of them has an NSA back door.

[ArcadeMan]

But... virtual servers use virtual electricity, not real electricity!

What cost the MS License fees ... ?

[Alain Williams]

How can they afford them ? Oh, wait .....

Re:What cost the MS License fees ... ?

[colinrichardday]

Because they're still running?

Breakdown?

[UnknowingFool]

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.

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...

[cusco]

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.

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.

Re:How much of that information is useful

[amicusNYCL]

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?

Re:How much of that information is useful

[cold fjord]

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.

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

[viperidaenz]

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.

How about correctly reporting Market share

[tuppe666]

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.

Re: How much of that information is useful

[alen]

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

Re:How much of that information is useful

[Anubis IV]

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.

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.

Only 50% are customer-facing

[sootman]

One half exists just to supply updates to the other half.

server comparison (BSD vs Micro$loth)

[JThaddeus]

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).

Re:How much of that information is useful

[Shark]

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.)

Hope they aren't running Windows

[guruevi]

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!

But...

[flyingfsck]

do they run Linux?

Someone got to ask you know.

The maximum uptime for Windows is ~17 months

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

So what indeed

[wonkey_monkey]

Can we put that on the end of all Slashdot headlines from now on?