Inside Amazon's Data Centers 42
1sockchuck writes "Amazon Web Services usually doesn't say much about the data centers powering its cloud computing platform. But last week the company held a technology open house to discuss the company's infrastructure, sharing cost data and a glimpse of a modular data center design. The key point: AWS is growing like crazy. 'Every day Amazon Web Services adds enough new capacity to support all of Amazon.com's global infrastructure through the company's first 5 years, when it was a $2.76 billion annual revenue enterprise,' said AWS Engineer James Hamilton, whose presentation (PDF) is available online."
Re:PDF is heavily slashdotted (Score:4, Informative)
Re:PDF is heavily slashdotted (Score:3, Informative)
I have mirrored the PDF here too: http://www.tghost.co.uk/JamesHamilton_AmazonOpenHouse20110607.pdf [tghost.co.uk]
Re:What good is that (Score:5, Informative)
Re:any reason they don't buy larger servers? (Score:5, Informative)
Looking at a 3-5 years TCO, and power costs where these data centers are located, power costs are noise in the equation.
Taking advantage of commodity pricing in the lower tiers is where the savings is at. Example, single socket systems are a lot cheaper on the procs and mainboards than dual sockets. Quad socket processors are significantly more expensive per proc..
At $0.10 per KwH, a 400W server is $350/year to power. Quad socket processors (Intel I7) can be as high as $4500 each!