Google Running 900,000 Servers 127
1sockchuck writes "How many servers is Google using? The company won't say, but a new report places the number at about 900,000. The estimate is based on data Google shared with researcher Jonathan Koomey, for a new report on data center power use. The data updates a 2007 report to Congress, and includes a surprise: data centers are using less energy than projected, largely due to the impact of the recession (buying fewer servers) and virtualization."
Re:Real Question (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think that's that big of a problem, once you plan for having that many from the get go. All of those servers must be automatically provisioned, and their names are irrelevant and are machine generated. No one ever needs to know those names. Their management software probably manages servers by function. Say they have so many storage nodes, so many storage indexers, so many load balancers, so many static content servers, so many web spiders, etc. The configurations for any particular server must be generated, too, from some sort of a global configuration for their whole "system".