Microsoft’s one million servers: what it means

By Nancy Gohring
Digging through the transcript of Microsoft’s recent Worldwide Partner Conference, a number of people paused at CEO Steve Ballmer’s comment that the company now has one million servers. As interesting is that he said that Google has more and Amazon fewer, while other big names like Facebook and Yahoo are in the 100,000 ballpark.

--Does Ballmer know how Microsoft compares to his competitors? Probably not. As well-known Amazon Web Services
engineer James Hamilton notes, Amazon has never released a server count. Neither has Google, although two years
ago a Stanford professor deduced, based on official data about Google’s data center energy output, that Google had around 900,000 servers
--What does the number mean about Microsoft data center efficiency? That’s a tough one to answer. Microsoft’s IaaS and PaaS services are dwarfed by AWS. Bing is dwarfed by Google. More than 300 million people use Outlook.com, but 100 million more use Gmail.

Then there are Microsoft services, like Office 365 and other hosted enterprise software, that neither AWS or Google offer.

Do all of Microsoft’s flagging competitive services, like Azure and Bing, plus its enterprise services, add up to more workloads than AWS has? Or is Microsoft just really inefficient at running its data centers?

These are questions posed by Roger, in the comments after Hamilton’s blog post. He suggests we can’t compare efficiency based on server numbers: “The numbers they should brag about are ratios – servers per system ops/admin person, annual power consumption per user, servers per user, etc.” he wrote.

--Regardless of the comparison, what more does the one million figure tell us about Microsoft’s data center? Hamilton does the math for us. He figures that one million servers equals 15 – 30 data centers, a $4.25 billion capital expense, and power consumption of 2.6TWh annually, or the amount of power that would be used by 230,000 homes in the U.S.

Those numbers are all huge, but plausible given Microsoft’s size.

--Should we care? Hamilton argues the number isn’t useful “mostly because a single data point is open to a lot of misinterpretation by even skilled industry observers.”

That said, apparently there’s significant interest throughout the industry. Data Center Knowledge said that its page that lists the best information about who has the most servers is one of its most popular.

Take a look, it’s very interesting to see the enormous differences in scale. Rackspace, for instance, has just 94,000 servers. In 2011, SoftLayer said it had 100,000. EBay has 54,000 servers, compared to Facebook’s “hundreds of thousands.”

Ultimately, it’s intriguing to find out how many servers Microsoft has, particularly because the giants in the industry are secretive about such data center metrics. But unless we have additional metrics, it’s just too hard to draw any meaningful conclusions from the number.

Read more of Nancy Gohring's "To the Cloud" blog and follow the latest IT news at ITworld. Follow Nancy on Twitter at @ngohring and on Google+. For the latest IT news, analysis and how-tos, follow ITworld on Twitter and Facebook.

The end of Symbian: Nokia ships last handset with the mobile OS

Two years ago, Symbian was still the #1 mobile operating system. What happened?
by Christopher Null (PC World)

Will the last one to leave please turn out the valot?

This week, Finnish smartphone creator Nokia announced that it had shipped its final handset running the Symbian operating system. As the last company in the world building phones using the Symbian OS, Nokia's withdrawal from the platform means Symbian is now completely defunct.

Symbian's fall from dominance is a tale about which books can (and should) be written. Its origins date to the '80s, but as of 1998, Symbian's existence was formalized when an old PDA company, Psion, changed its name to Symbian and took funding from the major phone manufacturers at the time, including Ericsson and Motorola, to become the official caretaker of the rising mobile OS.

But Nokia has always been Symbian's biggest supporter. The company produced millions of phones running the OS, and the two have always had close ties. Together they dominated the cell phone market throughout the early 2000s; in fact, Symbian remained the top-selling smartphone OS worldwide until late 2010.

That abrupt reversal of fortune was due to a couple of factors: First, the rise of Android and iOS as the dominant phone OSes, sought-after by consumers dropping simplistic handsets in favor of smartphones. Second, Nokia's fall from grace (for much the same reason), along with its fateful 2011 decision to jump into bed with Microsoft and the Windows Phone OS. At that point, the only remaining Symbian backer (and the main contributor to the Symbian code base) said goodbye to the OS, and the writing was on the wall for what would happen next.

Today, Symbian is actually maintained by Accenture, a management consulting company, to which Nokia outsourced development (and shipped off thousands of employees) in 2011. Accenture is supposed to maintain the OS through 2016.

So, what killed Symbian? Complexity, according to Nokia. In reports, the company blamed Symbian's difficult and unfriendly code structure for the extended time it takes for a phone using that OS to be developed. BGR quotes a Nokia spokesperson complaining that a typical Symbian handset required 22 months of development time, compared to less than a year with Windows Phone. In today's environment, when markets are made and lost in a matter of weeks, that just won't fly.

For businesses with large deployments of Symbian smartphones, well, there's probably little need to fret. First, there's no question you've seen this day coming for at least a few years, and chances are you've long since figured out a successor to standardize on. For those stragglers, that deal with Accenture means you'll likely get security updates and other fixes for the next three years--that's plenty of time to decide whether you want to jump to Android, iOS, Windows Phone, or--dare we suggest it--BlackBerry. (The smart money seems to be on moving to Android.)

Catchyit : The Symbian OS has had a good run, take a bow ... goodbye