Perspectives - Counting Servers is Hard

Excerpt from insightful analysis by (Microsoft alumnus) James Hamilton (via Charles Fitzgerald)

"At the Microsoft World-Wide Partners Conference, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced that “We have something over a million servers in our data center infrastructure. Google is bigger than we are. Amazon is a little bit smaller. You get Yahoo! and Facebook, and then everybody else is 100,000 units probably or less.”

That’s a surprising data point for a variety of reasons. The most surprising is that the data point was released at all. Just about nobody at the top of the server world chooses to boast with the server count data point. Partly because it’s not all that useful a number but mostly because a single data point is open to a lot of misinterpretation by even skilled industry observers. Basically, it’s pretty hard to see the value of talking about server counts and it is very easy to see the many negative implications that follow from such a number"

Perspectives - Counting Servers is Hard