

Amazon Cloud Supported by 450,000 Servers - 1SockChuck
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/03/14/estimate-amazon-cloud-backed-by-450000-servers/

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ceejayoz
Actual headline:

 _Estimate_ : Amazon Cloud Backed by 450,000 Servers

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nodesocket
Don't know why Liu thought AWS would use blade servers. 1U commodity "pizza
box" servers make the most sense by far. In-fact, I wouldn't be surprised if
Amazon was making their own servers (see Google
<http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html>)

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mrb
I agree. I don't know why Liu made that assumption. Most large scale data
center operators agree that blades are not a good solution:

1\. Not cost effective because they don't benefit from the economy of scale of
commodity hardware like pizza box servers.

2\. More expensive to operate as they often require redesigning/reinforcing
cooling as they concentrate too much power in too little space.

3\. The space-saving advantage of blades doesn't address the root of the
problem: any data center architect worth his salt will design a data center to
be power-constrained, not space-constrained.

Liu should have read his source more extensively, James Hamilton, VP at Amazon
Web Services, who has criticized blades for these exact reasons:
[http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/09/11/WhyBladeServersA...](http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/09/11/WhyBladeServersArentTheAnswerToAllQuestions.aspx)

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ridruejo
Why not point directly to the original article?
[http://huanliu.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/amazon-data-
center-s...](http://huanliu.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/amazon-data-center-size/)

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wmf
Here's a hint: <http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=1SockChuck>

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cperciva
_"Photos from a 2011 presentation by AWS Distinguished Engineer James Hamilton
show 1U “pizza box” rackmount servers rather than blades"_

Those look like 2U boxes to me. The slides even talk about a "rack of 20
servers with Top of Rack switch".

And it's been obvious from the start that EC2 instances are subdivisions of
larger servers; given the sizes of servers involved, the power distribution
and cooling issues would make using blades a nightmare.

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robszumski
I'd like to see this method used against a cloud that discloses server numbers
to see if it holds up. Seems like a lot of assumptions are being made.

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latch
For some reason, I expected the number to be much, much higher.

3 or 4 years ago, a Rackspace sells rep told us that they managed over 500K
servers. Never knew how true it was, never really doubted it.

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hugs
Next time, ask them to clarify whether it's physical servers or virtual
machines. They could easily have had 500K virtual machines running <100K
physical servers.

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cop359
Can anyone make an estimate on how much that would cost?

