Report: Amazon Cloud Backed By 450,000 Servers 45
1sockchuck writes "How many servers does it take to power Amazon's huge cloud computing operation? A researcher estimates that Amazon Web Services is using at least 454,400 servers in seven data center hubs around the globe. The analysis suggests up to 70 percent of those servers may be in Virginia."
Go Virginia (Score:1)
They don't call it the Old Dominion for nothing
Re:Go Virginia (Score:5, Funny)
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Too late. Starts next year, apparently. :(
http://hamptonroads.com/2012/02/virginia-sales-tax-looms-amazoncom
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Virginia, or more precisely the DC suburbs near Dulles Airport, is a popular spot for data centers for the same reasons as the bay area. Lots of companies have data centers there, so there is lots of infrastructure, so lots of companies have data centers there, so .there is lots of infrastructure...
I think the TLAs you are thinking of are more than capable of interfering with data centers anywhere in the country.
Obligatory xkcd (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory "The IT Crowd" (Score:1)
Does the elders of the internet know that he took it down from Big Ben? That is where the best reception is. Also about the cord ... it's wireless. Hello?
one server per human (Score:1)
I wonder when the world's number of servers will be equal to number of humans?
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Bad Math and Bullshit Story (Score:5, Insightful)
So, first off, the guy who came up with this number made a ridiculous number of assumptions with no real evidence to back them up, so the number is completely meaningless. Also, from TFA:
Liu then applied an assumption of 64 blade servers per rack – four 10U chassis, each holding eight blades – to arrive at the estimate.
Now, I might have to go dig out my TI-82 to doublecheck, but I think I see a small flaw in this math.
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When one person of one company figures out how much equipment another company has, why is that called "research"? It sounds like high school where you do "research" for your "paper".
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um (Score:5, Insightful)
No still a guess. From the blog he says he can only discover a rack if he managed to get a instance on it. So yes there might be racks that he never sees (for example I'm sure Amazon reserves some racks for themselves) but also he is assuming that the rack is full if he sees it. As well he is assuming he is right that the networking is done on a per rack manner for all the datacentres. Who knows different datacentres might do it differently (for example maybe europe only has half the servers of a US based datacentre but to keep the number of vlans the same they split the racks in half and only use the first half of the /22 IPs, maybe Amazon has a crap load of racks half full because they haven't gotten around to installing all the equipment, are in the middle of a hardware refresh, debating on having NAT or compute chassis in the available space etc. The only way to have a reasonable idea is to knock on the door and ask them. If they answer they "might" be telling you the truth But "researching" from the outside? You have know idea what you are looking at.
Just as important... (Score:5, Insightful)
What about their support infrastructure? I don't care about the physical locations, but I'm wondering about how many UPS banks do they have? How many primary power feeds do they have to each location? How long do the diesel generators last? Electrical transformers? As a customer, I'm not just concerned about scalability and capability - I want to make sure my presence is always available too!
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You got it wrong: the best case is the smoking crater. Much easy to deal with than a flakey but still responsible service.
Re:Just as important... (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly. If 70% of the capacity is in Virginia can the other 30% keep everyone going? The other locations probably have a lot of load too because people tend to have instances in different zones to try to route traffic to nearby clusters for example. So lets say europe and asia each have the other 15% (I realize there is some other datacentres in the US so not exactly true but approximate). You have 2B+ people in asia all hitting that 15% of hardware already. Now you try to shovel off 35% of your network to their cluster ie greater than 2X more work and have all the extra latency issues to deal with (because presumably US instances were being used because they were closer to the users) ouch.
That said though I guess we don't know how their usage looks. They might be double sized already and so it would only be 0.5*(15+35)%. I doubt they are keeping that much spare capacity around but who knows?
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How long do the diesel generators last?
As long as folks can supply it with fuel, right?!
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But how much fuel do they have on hand? What if it snows so much that they can't get more diesel (OK, not likely in Virginia)?
what are these server things? (Score:5, Funny)
i thought the cloud was this magical circle in a white paper where all the data just lives
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"where all the data just lives"
If you delete data in the cloud, is it murder?
I think this is an ethical question that Google/FB have answered. They never delete data. It is wrong!
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Article is bogus. (Score:3)
Err. What? (Score:1)
Amazon cloud has ~17,000 CPU cores. Source: http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2011/11/amazon-powers-silk-with-one-of-the-worlds-fastest-supercomputers/
17,000 cores in half a million servers. Err. Error.
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So Amazon built a 17,000 core supercomputer. That just means they were able to allocate 17,000 cores to a supercomputer project and run benchmarks on them. Presumably the vast majority of the fleet was still serving external customers. I'm fairly confident that Amazon is not running benchmarks on cores which are currently being used by customers.
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You're referencing one virtual machine they spun up to show off their new EC2 instance type, not the entire capacity of their data centers worldwide.
My Version (Score:3)
Virginia (Score:2)
I wonder if the NSA is running things on it :-) Close enough.
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Not necessarily wat I was getting at but yeah I could see a case for that. Sure encourage people to post all kinds of personal information all in one or two very convenient locations, then give us a backdoor so we can "target ads" to suspected "customers".