Microsoft's video accidentally reveals that they have only ~200k servers
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Microsoft's video accidentally reveals that they have only ~200k servers
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Re: Microsoft's video accidentally reveals that they have only ~200k servers
#2Does it mean that google still has less than 1M?
Re: Microsoft's video accidentally reveals that they have only ~200k servers
#3Here's an interesting statistic: Based on 148357 servers consuming 72500 kW of power, Microsoft's average server is using 488 W of power at any point -- so clearly Microsoft is not following Google's approach of using smaller servers which each draw 200W or less.
Is the Windows kernel better at using large boxes than the linux kernel? Is Microsoft worse at managing clusters than Google? I'm sure there's some reason why Microsoft uses fewer more powerful servers while Google uses more less powerful servers.
Re: Microsoft's video accidentally reveals that they have only ~200k servers
#4Here's an interesting statistic: Based on 148357 servers consuming 72500 kW of power, Microsoft's average server is using 488 W of power at any point -- so clearly Microsoft is not following Google's approach of using smaller servers which each draw 200W or less. Is the Windows kernel better at using large boxes than the linux kernel? Is Microsoft worse at managing clusters than Google? I'm sure there's some reason w…
Google builds, Microsoft (as far as anyone knows) buys. It could be that Google simply can't economically source the components and/or make them work to use fewer larger servers. Or it could be that Google prefers to rip out an entire server when it fails rather than repairing it in-place, so they want each one as small/cheap as possible and don't really care about compute power per server.
Re: Microsoft's video accidentally reveals that they have only ~200k servers
#5Here's an interesting statistic: Based on 148357 servers consuming 72500 kW of power, Microsoft's average server is using 488 W of power at any point -- so clearly Microsoft is not following Google's approach of using smaller servers which each draw 200W or less. Is the Windows kernel better at using large boxes than the linux kernel? Is Microsoft worse at managing clusters than Google? I'm sure there's some reason w…
I wouldn't make any assumptions about Google's servers. Public info is generally some mix of inaccurate and out-of-date.
Re: Microsoft's video accidentally reveals that they have only ~200k servers
#6Here's an interesting statistic: Based on 148357 servers consuming 72500 kW of power, Microsoft's average server is using 488 W of power at any point -- so clearly Microsoft is not following Google's approach of using smaller servers which each draw 200W or less. Is the Windows kernel better at using large boxes than the linux kernel? Is Microsoft worse at managing clusters than Google? I'm sure there's some reason w…
I wouldn't make any assumptions about Google's servers. Public info is generally some mix of inaccurate and out-of-date.
Public info is generally some mix of inaccurate and out-of-date.
I was working based on this paper written by Google researchers in June 2007, which refers to one of Google's "typical" servers having a theoretical peak power of 213W and an actual peak power of 145W:
http://research.google.com/archive/power_provisioning.pdf
While I agree that in general information about Google's systems is a mix of inaccurate and out-of-date, I think it's probably safe to trust numbers given in research papers published by Google... especially when the numbers deal with how much power is being used, and the topic of the paper is power distribution within datacenters.
Re: Microsoft's video accidentally reveals that they have only ~200k servers
#7Here's an interesting statistic: Based on 148357 servers consuming 72500 kW of power, Microsoft's average server is using 488 W of power at any point -- so clearly Microsoft is not following Google's approach of using smaller servers which each draw 200W or less. Is the Windows kernel better at using large boxes than the linux kernel? Is Microsoft worse at managing clusters than Google? I'm sure there's some reason w…
It's not clear from the video, but the utility power number probably includes environmental stuff like cooling and lights. Just dividing one number by the other isn't going to give you the size of the power supply for each machine.
Re: Microsoft's video accidentally reveals that they have only ~200k servers
#8Here's an interesting statistic: Based on 148357 servers consuming 72500 kW of power, Microsoft's average server is using 488 W of power at any point -- so clearly Microsoft is not following Google's approach of using smaller servers which each draw 200W or less. Is the Windows kernel better at using large boxes than the linux kernel? Is Microsoft worse at managing clusters than Google? I'm sure there's some reason w…
It's not clear from the video, but the utility power number probably includes environmental stuff like cooling and lights. Just dividing one number by the other isn't going to give you the size of the power supply for each machine.
Environmental control is one of the largest power sucks of a data center. It's part of why data center space is so expensive per square foot.
Re: Microsoft's video accidentally reveals that they have only ~200k servers
#9Here's an interesting statistic: Based on 148357 servers consuming 72500 kW of power, Microsoft's average server is using 488 W of power at any point -- so clearly Microsoft is not following Google's approach of using smaller servers which each draw 200W or less. Is the Windows kernel better at using large boxes than the linux kernel? Is Microsoft worse at managing clusters than Google? I'm sure there's some reason w…
That's mostly like the power requirements for the datacenter as a whole, which would include things like HVAC, lighting, network equipment like switches and routers that don't appear in the "server" list, losses from power redundancy features (flywheels and batteries aren't free to operate) etc...
Re: Microsoft's video accidentally reveals that they have only ~200k servers
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't make any assumptions about Google's servers. Public info is generally some mix of inaccurate and out-of-date.
Public info is generally some mix of inaccurate and out-of-date. I was working based on this paper written by Google researchers in June 2007, which refers to one of Google's "typical" servers having a theoretical peak power of 213W and an actual peak power of 145W: http://research.google.com/archive/power_provisioning.pdf While I agree that in general information about Google's systems is a mix of inaccurate and out…
I think you're reading too much into the word "typical". It might be better understood as "example" or "typical of what is often found in a datacenter". Notice that all of the actual measured data in that paper is normalized to a value between 0 and 1, not given in watts.