Bink.nu has published some really interesting numbers about Microsoft’s IT infrastructure. Here is a summary with some additional analysis.
Inside Microsoft
- Internally, Microsoft has 10,000 servers in 3 data centers and one operations center.
- 6 million internal emails per day.
- 20 million emails from the internet, of which 97% are rejected as spam.
Interestingly, if 97% of 20 million emails are discarded as spam, that means that only 600,000 legitimate emails remain. Compare that to the 6 million internal emails (presumably not spam). I.e. the internal mail traffic at Microsoft, according to these numbers, outnumbers the legitimate emails from the outside by a factor of 10.
Windows Live Services
- 130,000 servers.
- 435 million unique users.
- 280 billion page views per day.
- 12 billion emails per day.
- 6 billion instant messages per day.
To give you some perspective on those numbers, let’s see how much that is per second:
- 3.24 million page views per second.
- 138,888 emails per second.
- 69,444 instant messages per second.
If these numbers from Bink.nu are correct, you can understand why Microsoft needs to put 130,000 servers into its Windows Live Services. They handle more per second than most websites have to handle in a month.
Microsoft.com website
Microsoft.com has a pretty decent load as well, which doesn’t come as too much of a surprise considering it is one of the most visited websites in the world.
- 280.5 million unique users worldwide (number 6 site worldwide)
- 15,000 requests per second.
- 85 servers for Microsoft.com.
15,000 requests per second is a lot, but it is peanuts compared to the numbers pushed around by Microsoft’s Windows Live Services.
Conclusion
All in all, it is an interesting set of numbers that Bink.nu has served up. We didn’t include everything in this post, so be sure to head over to Bink.nu if you want more MS IT numbers.
