Microsoft running on at least 220,000 servers Exactly how many servers does Microsoft own? Well, we still don't for sure, but it looks as if Redmond is running at least 148,357 boxes. A crafty web site called iStartedSomething caught Microsoft revealing its metal haul in a promotional video. The question and answer session with Chief Environmental Strategist Rob Bernard …
Based on a photo, I think its hard to say what Microsoft is running, because they are probably always installing new hardware and have lots of older hardware in some centers. I know around 2000, Microsoft favored quad-core rack-mounted servers in their data centers. Single-proc blades were made popular then by Linux, which was still not great at multiproc performance at that point in time.
All those datacentres are the biggies, but individual sites (eg Reading, UK) will have several hundred more - some for line-of-business apps that don't travel well to the nearest datacentre, some for customer testing, some for things like the swipe-card door system, etc. There's been a big effort to get as many boxes retired and into the datacentres as possible, but 'a few hundred' per major site would still be a fair estimate.
The 8.5 servers/rack - don't forget a heap of those will be big hefty heavy-lifting boxes with many many virtual servers on them, or maybe running a stack of drives as members of the SAN
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I wonder if Ballmer's office has a wall display consisting of 220,000 blue LEDs that indicate the machines currently showing the BSOD.
Would make an interesting display.
PS: it strikes me that these figures leave out the various desktop and laptop machines. Surely each MS employee has at least one.
Oh imagine a Swedish Polis Pirate Bay Style raid on a M$ server bay where they take whole the lot back to the home office for additional analysis , the data collapse spike would be enormous !
But then again when you have two billion plus computers phone home and say feed me , with windows vista babies in the remote woods calling home far more often then you think several times a day for every trivial problem they encounter and the red ring of death game hotboxes gobbling up reserves , little wonder that 10,000 new units per month can handle the load or why they use the ever compliant scalable unix as well !
Or should they take a leaf out of the Azureus code book and use bit torrent to self distribute updates ?
"But, er, if those numbers are to be believed, then Microsoft runs about 8.5 servers per rack, which seems disheartening in this day and age of bladey goodness."
Depends which are you look at, assuming that both sets of data are sorted alphabetically which they appear to be if you match overall server count with Kw consumed in the two screen grabs.
They appear to show that for example Columbia has 37,230 servers in 2,550 making 14.6 severs per rack on average, however Dublin has 1,209 servers in 318 racks making 3.8 servers per rack.
Interestingly if we take these figures and combine them with the utility power consumed we see that Columbia uses roughly 300W/server and Dublin is running at 950W/server???.
i have to say that 950W for a server seems a little high so maybe i have fudged something along the way, although if you check out Amsterdam they come out at a thoroughly respectable 288W/server.
Can a server consume nearly 1Kw? do these consumption figures include operating costs, i.e lighting, air con etc.
Any thoughts??
Until the rollout of Windows 2000, Microsoft was _all_ Unix in their corporate operations and development networks. One reason Windows 3.x was so bad is that they didn't have to use it internally and suffer the pain their customers were. They were running Sun hardware, IIRC.
Netgeek
True, Microsoft needs to think hard. It needs to think hard if it should sponsor a USA president which will order a muppet on CIA payroll to murder 1500 civilians in cold blood to ensure that the current USA president pocket Star War project proceeds unimpeded.
This is the reason for the entire Ossetian war: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7561926.stm
It was nothing but an extremely bloody PR exercise to ensure that the Polish public opinion is not 60%+ against signing on the eve of the event (and to make sure that the Polish politicians do not dare chickening out).
So as a matter of fact, from the perspective of the "stability" of its Siberian (and other strange places) projects Microsoft has a considerabledegree of control on it. The stability is largely determined in Capitol Hill and executed from Langley. A USA corporation with the MSFT turnover can always make itself heard and its interest defended in both places.
I'm all for free speech, but can we keep the foaming at the moth crackpots and their downright offensive CIA conspiracy theories in topics relating to the Georgian conflict, and not allow them to infest the rest of the comments sections, it gets in the way of a decent round of Microsoft bashing.
"Microsoft runs about 8.5 servers per rack"
Now, I'm sure that's meant to be "Microsoft [software] runs [on] about 8.5 servers per rack" - the rest of the servers will be Linux based, for reliability, scalability and flexibility (obviously the apache headers will need to be replaced by the IIS versions etc)
As for google, last I heard (probably about 18 months ago), they had about 10000 servers, running a highly customised version of linux and doing a hell of a lot more than Microsofts 200000!
We have a Dell Power edge 6800 with a single 3Ghz Xeon, 20Gb of ram and 8 internal SAS disks. I have measured its power usage and it runs most of the day between 640 and 680 watts. The most impressive thing about the system is that the power supplies are rated at 1.8Kw each. As such I can wel believe a bigger quad socket server with a proper amount of ram could use 900+watts.
Shame Microsoft don't have to run their own power station to run these buggers, if they did we could get old green peace on there case.
Nah, you've got it wrong...
"Moving forward, however, Redmond will need to try a bit harder if it's to meet Bill Gates' goal of owning millions of servers."
...they're looking to pwn servers not own them. After all, they already pwned millions of desktops with that insecure little OS they called Windows XP. Pwning desktops running Vista isn't a challenge because nobody's running the damn thing, so instead they'll release an app (cunningly disguised as a hotfix) that opens up all the 2K and 2K3 servers instead. Oh lordy... we're all doomed!
Mine's the one with the cute little penguin that is capable of beating Microsoft's finest designers and coders without even trying (and doing it all in it's spare time as a hobby too!)
Yup, time for the 'head in sands' MS fanboys to strike up the 'lunatic comments' deflection shields.
Already common knowledge that the FBI are an operating branch of MS's 'Business Software Alliance' - why else would they accompany the BSA 'representatives when they've been refused entrance to a firm for an 'audit' and wandered of with computers for analysis in the FBI labs. No great stretch of the imagination to recognise that if the FBI can do it openly in the land of the free, the CIA will be doing it elsewhere.
One other point "over that way" - Tbilisi (Georgia) is 1600 miles from Omsk (Siberia, the Russian federation) - about the same as distance as Chicago, Illinois to Mexico City, Mexico - hardly local.
Governor of the largest part of Siberia is the world's 15th richest man (and close friend of Vladimir Putin) Roman Abramovich. i.e. Siberia is probably one of the safest places on the planet to put a data centre - I doubt very much that the Russian Federation are going to be attacked by the Russian Federation in the way that Georgia was.
.... rumour has it MS recently purchased several lakes in Washington state to build hydro-electric power stations for their data centres.
Hard to know exactly what they have but 220k is a low side estimate - they are building many new data centres (e.g. in Ireland) to host the server side of their Software + Services strategy. Google probably still owns more but MS is catching up fast.
And despite what the Linux wishers hope the vast majority of live systems are running Windows Server (well over 99.9% of servers I'd bet) many even on prerelease software. The only live Linux are supporting apps from acquisitions that have not bee rolled off them.
hang on the same Abramovich who was fined be putin for dodge deals the one putin wanted in jail. the one all the tv channels ran documentatires about how the russian government hated him. and the reason he sank millions into briton in the hope of moving here to get out of russia. and the only reason his still Governor there is he supports a whole town on his billions that would otherwise by unlivable(one likeable thing about the guy). yeah i'm sure with his billions microsoft's money is going to be a big incentive hey maybe he'll get them to pay for his town so he can resign as Governor.
don't like the guy after all he owns chelsea FC but you got to respect man who can make millions from a dodge deal during the collapse of soviet russia. and a. still be alive and b. still be quite respectable.(even after corruption charges and a fine of million if not billions of dollars.) hell i'd take the money forget the respectability
of course this is all from memory of those documentaries. don't have time to google it all for the orginal documents and i don't turst wiki
or i could be a M.I.6 agent working with the C.I.A to reflect the bad press.
oh on the whole server thing 8.5 servers isn't brilliant but it;'s not bad we currently have 7 racks at about 50 servers so that's 7 per rack that's not including spam devices switches routers etc. we moving to blades soon so will can some racks so hopefully it'll get better the real issue is POWER we use shed loads of it thats the reason we going to blades and virutal server
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