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.

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.

wtf?

[JediJorgie]

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

No wonder none of my coworkers come here anymore.

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.

Only 50% are customer-facing

[sootman]

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