Amazon’s Web Services Uses 450K Servers

Amazon’s cloud computing operation is estimated to use at least 454,000 servers in seven data center hubs around the world. Data on the matter was offered by Accenture Technology Labs, as Amazon Web Services has yet to disclose details on its infrastructure.

Huan Liu, a research manager at Accenture, analyzed Amazon’s EC2 computing service using internal and external IP addresses – he then extrapolated, came up with estimates on the number of racks in each data center location and took into account the number of blade servers per rack, to come up with his numbers.

Interestingly, Liu’s data shows the concentration of Amazon IP addresses in Northern Virginia, where Amazon keeps several data centers. Liu figures that there are 5,030 data racks in Northern Virginia, roughly 70% of all racks consisting Amazon Web Services. The Amazon U.S. West region in Oregon has only 41 data racks.

Liu’s estimates easily put the size of Amazon’s data structure well above the hosting providers that have publicly disclosed their server counts, but still at about half the estimated 900,000 servers in Google’s data center network.