Amazon Cloud Supported by 450,000 Servers | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Cloud Supported by 450,000 Servers

datacenterknowledge.com

47 points1SockChuck12 comments

Actual headline:

Estimate: Amazon Cloud Backed by 450,000 Servers

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)

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...

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

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

I submitted it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3706915

"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.

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.

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.

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.

Rackspace publicly discloses its number of servers.

The latest investor presentation slide deck on the Investor link from the front page of rackspace.com lists the number of customers at 170k+ on 79k+ servers.

[Edit to fix typo.]

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com