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Windows Operating Systems Software Microsoft Upgrades

Microsoft Migrates Internal Servers to 64-bit 357

Posted by CowboyNeal from the movin-on-up dept.
daria42 writes "Microsoft says servers running the company's website and MSN Search and Messenger applications have been migrated to the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003. 'Our MSN search engine is actually built on several thousand systems running the x64 version of Windows,' a spokesperson said. In addition, 'the entire Microsoft.com site has been migrated, and we serve 30 million unique visitors every day.' According to the company, the Messenger servers handle about 70 million users."
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Microsoft Migrates Internal Servers to 64-bit More

Microsoft Migrates Internal Servers to 64-bit

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  • It is just me, or are most Microsoft servers down? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nmg196 ( 184961 ) * on Friday April 29, 2005 @07:03AM (#12381884)
    I almost can't believe what I'm seeing.... Maybe it's just a coincidence but I can't currently connect to MSN Messenger (Trillian crashes) AND I can't see www.microsoft.com [microsoft.com] or use Windows Update from here in the UK!

    I can't imagine that Microsoft.com could get slashdotted, so maybe they're having some severe teething issues.

    This doesn't bode well for the future of 64bit Windows computing :)

  • AMD? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 29, 2005 @07:04AM (#12381889)
    So does this mean that it is likely that Microsoft are running AMD chips in their servers?

    • Or Intel (Score:3, Informative)

      by Moraelin ( 679338 )
      You do realize that Intel's latest Xeons have the same AMD64 instructions too, right?

      • Re:Or Intel (Score:2, Interesting)

        by MSFanBoi ( 695480 )
        Actually Intel's implementation of the AMD64 instructions isn't exactly the same. Intel's implementation (EM64T) is based on an earlier version of the AMD64 instruction set.

      • Re:Or Intel (Score:2, Insightful)

        by henrywood ( 879946 )
        Yeah - nice to see Intel having to play catch-up with AMD for a change.

        • Thank Microsoft for that, actually (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Moraelin ( 679338 ) on Friday April 29, 2005 @07:40AM (#12382142) Journal
          Just as a piece of trivia: Intel did want to come up with its very own 64 bit extensions, but MS basically told it that it can't be arsed to support yet another different set of 64 bit instructions. So basically the choice Intel had was squarely (A) implement AMD's set that Microsoft supports, or (B) not have any 64 bit Windows support.

    • Re:AMD? (Score:5, Informative)

      by avidday ( 671814 ) on Friday April 29, 2005 @07:42AM (#12382158)
      Indeed they are - they recently bought a pile of Sun Fire V20z and V40z dual/quad Opteron servers from Sun - you can even see the Sun and Microsoft engineers posing in front of the racks here [milton.com].
    • So does this mean that it is likely that Microsoft are running AMD chips in their servers?

      Not a clue what they're running at the end of the big pipes in the US, but the ones I've seen (and one I configured) in AU are HP, running Itaniums, IIRC, though it's possible they're in for a consulting job rather than for MSIT.

      My recollection may be shaky, though, as I can't find the actual model on the HP site as yet...

  • AMD or INTEL? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mwdmeyer ( 803276 ) on Friday April 29, 2005 @07:06AM (#12381902) Homepage
    Soo, are they running on the Opteron or the new Xeon?

  • About time (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    About time. We had a dual CPU 64-bit system back at school (between 1992-95) - some time during that time, the system was upgraded from quad 68030 to dual Risc4000 and later Risc4400 processors.

    As usual Microsoft is ten years behind times.
    • About time. We had a dual CPU 64-bit system back at school (between 1992-95) - some time during that time, the system was upgraded from quad 68030 to dual Risc4000 and later Risc4400 processors.

      As usual Microsoft is ten years behind times.       No surprises there, then. Incidentally, I think LiveJournal now uses 64-bit servers on the databases at least; not sure what sort, but Microsoft do seem to have been delayed in switching to 64-bit by not using Linux.
      • Considering that NT's kernel, which is the core of XP and 2003, was basically stolen by David Cutler from DEC and originally was David's code written for the Alpha, it's not shocking that Windows can finally support 64-bit. It's quite embarassing that it took them this long, since the kernel was originally written for the 64-bit Alpha CPU.

    • Re:About time (Score:3, Informative)

      by Erik Hensema ( 12898 )

      Windows was already 64 bit when the DEC Alpha came out. Which was somewhere between 1992-95 IIRC.

      The only news is is that windows now actually runs on a popular 64 bit processor. It already ran on Itanium for some time too.

  • Akamai (Score:4, Insightful)

    by A beautiful mind ( 821714 ) on Friday April 29, 2005 @07:08AM (#12381917)
    'the entire Microsoft.com site has been migrated, and we serve 30 million unique visitors every day.'

    Aren't they using Akamai's help in that?
    • For DNS and bandwidth yes, but not for their servers.

    • Re:Akamai (Score:3, Informative)

      by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 )
      Yes, most of the streaming and ad content and certainly the DNS is Akamai based. Those are the 3 key services designed to take down your servers. The fact that Akamai won't run them on Windows, since it's painful to administer remotely and nearly impossible to secure, is an endless source of embarassment to Microsoft.

  • A couple thousand servers... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by HairyCanary ( 688865 ) on Friday April 29, 2005 @07:09AM (#12381925)
    I wonder how MSN search compares to Google in terms of hardware versus load. With a couple of thousand servers in place, it would be interesting to see how many queries per second MSN search can handle per box as compared with Google...

    • Re:A couple thousand servers... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by 0x461FAB0BD7D2 ( 812236 ) on Friday April 29, 2005 @07:28AM (#12382062) Journal
      There's an idea for Google right there: a Google benchmark.

      Stress-test your own systems with randomized queries Google (or MSN or Yahoo!) gets and see how well it stacks up against Google's (or MSN's or Yahoo!'s) hardware, rated with GMarks (or YMarks! or....you get the idea).

    • Re:A couple thousand servers... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ScentCone ( 795499 ) on Friday April 29, 2005 @07:43AM (#12382160)
      I wonder how MSN search compares to Google in terms of hardware versus load.

      Pretty much of an apples/oranges problem there, though. Yes, a search is a search is a search... but there are very different things going on relative to MSN membership, Google AdSense ads, and so on. Very different back-end processes and business issues would completely eclipse, I suspect, discussions about the individual web servers' OS. IIS on Win2003 may not be every slashdotter's cup of tea, but it's not orders of magnitude different from other servers in its ability to serve up a page. It's all that other behind-the-scenes tomfoolerly that both sites are doing that are what really weigh them down and burn up the CPU cycles. It's the database architecture and plumbing that really makes this stuff fascinating (and mysterious, if you don't work there).

      • It's the database architecture and plumbing that really makes this stuff fascinating (and mysterious, if you don't work there).

        There's an interesting video on Channel9 [msdn.com] interviewing Omar Shahine [shahine.com] that describes Hotmail internal architecture. Yup, Channel9 is a Microsoft sponsored site, and Omar is a lead program manager on a Hotmail team. He has a great blog that shows a love for devices; you'll find him talking about the iPod, Treo, PSP, etc. Channel9 also has a ton of videos on everything ranging from C#

  • And, with that... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Stormwatch ( 703920 ) <(rodrigogirao) (at) (hotmail.com)> on Friday April 29, 2005 @07:12AM (#12381938) Homepage
    ...they voided the computers' warranties.

  • from 250 to 25 servers (Score:5, Interesting)

    by diegocgteleline.es ( 653730 ) on Friday April 29, 2005 @07:13AM (#12381948)
    Apparently, the number of servers that run messenger went from 250 32-bit servers to 25 64-bit servers [windowsitpro.com]. Apparently it was due to a limit in the number of network connections in the 32-bit edition

    What are the "network limits" of linux, BSD, etc BTW?

    • Re:from 250 to 25 servers (Score:5, Funny)

      by smittyoneeach ( 243267 ) * on Friday April 29, 2005 @07:18AM (#12382000) Homepage Journal
      What are the "network limits" of linux, BSD, etc BTW?
      What do you want to program them to be today?
      • What are the "network limits" of linux, BSD, etc BTW?

        What do you want to program them to be today?

        It actually surprises me Microsoft don't hack their OS from time to time to fit their own needs...
        • Hacking an internal product to make it work is generally frowned upon at Microsoft. If you need the app to behave a certain way, there is a good chance that other customers would too so the right thing to do is to send that feedback back to the product group so they can fix the product. Which is not to say that IT will never use special hacks to get something to work the way they want to, just that there is a resistance to doing so.
    • It's pretty high.

      ;-)
      But that's necessary, of course, since only Windows prevents raw TCP/IP connections which we all know are hazardous. I'm sure those people with their unsafe operating systems have to have a really high limit so they'll be able to add more systems together and withstand the impending DOS attacks.

      Going with Windows is just *so* much cheaper. The OS even prevents you from buying too many machines!
    • Of course, "bit" alone is a relatively weak performance indicator.

      For all we know, they could have replaced 400Mhz Xeons with Opteron 250 systems...
    • The limits is an performance one not code, in any of the oses you are likely to find some "reasonable default" together with a maximum setting, which could of course have been higher/use another data type if there was a use for it. I guess you can change the values for Windows settings and in some BSDs atleast you'll be limited by the maximum amount of file descriptors for the system, maybe for the user depending on settings and in NetBSD and older OpenBSDs (I think they changed it in the newer ones) a thin
    • Whatever you set them to using sysctl (on linux and bsd) and in solaris using ndd or /etc/system i think.

  • imagine (Score:2, Funny)

    by NoGuffCheck ( 746638 )
    MSN search engine is actually built on several thousand systems running the x64 version of Windows

    image a beowulf cluster of these :)

  • 64bit is all you need (Score:5, Funny)

    by digitaldc ( 879047 ) on Friday April 29, 2005 @07:14AM (#12381964)
    "You only need to port what's necessary," he said. "If you've got a little graphic interface and it looks real pretty and it's 32-bit, that's fine - it'll run. But when you need the 32-bit addressing, the bigger data space, certainly port that into 64-bit."
    This reminds me of some other famous quotes:

    "There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed." Source: Focus Magazine, nr.43, pages 206-212, (October 23, 1995) (http://www.cantrip.org/nobugs.html [cantrip.org])
    "Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It's a good thing we have museums to document that" Source: Speech at Computer History Museum (http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/10/01/HNgates talksmuseum_1.html [infoworld.com]), InfoWorld magazine, October 2001
    "640K ought to be enough for anybody."

    • "There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed."

      In related news it was found that spyware and spam hackers have een filtering bug reports from the inbound queues on Microsoft's mail servers.

    • Er... What is your point?

      He says that you can run 32bit and 64bit code, so one is not forced to port everything even if there is no improvement for that kind of app.

      How does that compare to those "640K enough for everybody" fake-quotes?

      (and Btw: 64bit could really be as much Ram as anybody will ever use in a single-image computer...)
  • "The 64-bit servers will demonstrate increased responsiveness in displaying the enhanced Stop Errors (aka BSOD). These new Stop Errors have been enhanced in two aspects:

    1. The even more cryptic Stop Error Codes will increase Microsoft revenue by 38%, as even less people will have any idea what application has crashed and why, thereby increasing Technical Support calls.

    2. We have implemented a different shade of blue associated with the Stop Errors. This will give give System Administrators a brief r

  • 64-bit hardware? (Score:5, Funny)

    by MadCow42 ( 243108 ) on Friday April 29, 2005 @07:16AM (#12381978) Homepage
    But are all those systems actually running 64-bit hardware? If not, the announcement is pointless.

    MS: "Yes, our brand new car has a beautiful high-tech hydrogen fuel cell in it!"

    Driver: "But it's a diesel car..."

    MS: "Well... yes.... it's actually just sitting in the back seat for now."

    MadCow.

  • Altavista used 64 bit servers at launch years ago (Score:5, Insightful)

    by expro ( 597113 ) on Friday April 29, 2005 @07:18AM (#12382001)
    And they probably had far better OS utilization of the 64 bit architecture with their VMS or Unix. So what.

    They also had much better capability and accuracy, allowing you to search for exactly what you wanted, not just what was most popular, allowing things like the near keyword, partial word wildcarding, and many more.

    Why don't we ever hear of better search capabilities, instead of nearly-meaningless hardware shifts. The market has stagnated under Google who can't figure out how to offer even as good a search as their competitors offered at the time they launched.

    Tell me something useful.
    • Why don't we ever hear of better search capabilities, instead of nearly-meaningless hardware shifts.

      November 11, 2004 http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php /3434261 [searchenginewatch.com]
    • Are you talking about the same Altavista the rest of us used?

      You know, altavista.com, the one that worked for a few months and then got spammed into oblivion and has been fairly unusable ever since which is why everyone now uses Google?

      I would never have described it as 'accurate'. The only reason it could possibly be seen to be accurate was because at one stage, there were no porn sites to spam the index with, so it *had* to return decent page by default - because that's all that was there.
      • Are you talking about the same Altavista the rest of us used?

        I think that question should be turned around and asked to you.

        Altavista, for years, was altavista.digital.com and was the best search engine on the internet. altavista.com pointed to some other company that enjoyed tons of free publicity from people typing in the wrong thing. Later on, digital spun off the search engine (I think it was around the time of the Compaq sale), the new company bought the altavista.com domain name, and slowly turned

  • In other news... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Netsensei ( 838071 ) on Friday April 29, 2005 @07:21AM (#12382019) Homepage
    ... Lamborghini decided to get the engine of their next model be designed by kia

  • Microsoft has always gone "dog food" (Score:5, Informative)

    by MSFanBoi ( 695480 ) on Friday April 29, 2005 @07:25AM (#12382042) Journal
    Before W2k was out, Microsoft migrated most internal, and everything external to W2k before it was gold. Before E2k3 was released, Microsoft was running it on all internal servers. Before W2k3 was released, Microsoft was running it on all internal and external servers. Before XP was released most workstations were upgraded to it. Microsoft has always been a very much proponent of "eating your own dog food". And yes when it goes gold Microsoft moves to that version and it's the same version sold to everyone else.
    • But remember how long it took them to migrate Hotmail over to Windows servers? It was a major embarassment that for quite a few years their big aquisition still ran the Solaris backend/FreeBSD frontend combo.
    • But doesn't everyone eat their own dogfood as applicable? If Microsoft says their stuff can do xyz and they need a product that can do xyz, it would look horrible if they used another companies product or even an older version of their own product.

      Having said this, does it really matter? Microsoft's corporate goals and resources are much different than most companies. For all intents and purposes, Microsoft has unlimited resources so they can "throw hardware at the problem" or beef up the cluster to provid
      • "Microsoft has unlimited resources so they can "throw hardware at the problem"..."

        Where do you get this idea? Are you talking from experience, or from some preconcieved notion not based on any actual data?

        Remember that even though MS has billions of dollars, the end result of their projects is to be profitable. As such, and I can tell you from past experience, MSN is under budgetary constraints just like any other project would be. It wouldn't make any sense for them to throw unlimited amounts of mone
    • Tell me when they are running their own firewalls... or even when they provide their public services (ftp, html, smtp) on servers only protected by their own OS - irregardless of who makes the firewall on top.
  • The gates in my computer are AND, OR and NOT; they are not Bill.

    Yeah..old one && offtopic, shame on me.

  • hotmail (Score:4, Informative)

    by OglinTatas ( 710589 ) on Friday April 29, 2005 @07:31AM (#12382084)
    that would explain why my throwaway hotmail account (for recieving commercial email, and all the spam that ensues) was broken the last few days. I thought they had nerfed it again to break even more functionality in firefox and safari (they did that before) and I was just going to abandon it before I would ever load up msie. I just checked it today and it is working again.
  • The author should have added a direct link to Microsoft.com, so we could all click like sheeps (we all do it -- we just don't RTFA) and see if their new gear is slashdot-proof :P

  • Stock prices-AMD? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by va3atc ( 715659 ) * on Friday April 29, 2005 @08:02AM (#12382275) Homepage Journal
    Wouldn't a move like this greatly help AMD's image?

    If its good enough for Microsoft, its good enough for us, right boss?

    Never been much into stocks, but right about now something tells me to buy. ;)
    • With a little exception...

      "If Microsoft servers after the migration crashed from slashdotting, imagine what would happen to our hosts under load."

  • Licence Costs? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by dpeltzm1 ( 706854 )
    Does any one know the approximate licence costs if this was paid for the 'thousands' of servers they use? If google 'paid' this cost would they still be in business? I'll bet it's a scary number ;-(
  • It's all very well the OS running in 64bit mode, but are the apps running in 64bit mode as well or is the shiny new OS running the old 32bit applications?

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