Gates and the Microsoft cloud: many millions of servers

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Nick Carr talks about Bill Gates’ farewell address at Microsoft’s TechEd developer conference. He quotes Gates as saying

Microsoft logoWe’re taking everything we do at the server level, and saying that we will have a service that mirrors that exactly. The simplest one of those is to say, okay, I can run Exchange on premise, or I can connect up to it as a service. But even at the BizTalk level, we’ll have BizTalk Services. For SQL, we’ll have SQL Server Data Services, and so you can connect up, build the database. It will be hosted in our cloud with the big, big data center, and geo-distributed automatically. This is kind of fascinating because it’s getting us to think about data centers at a scale that never existed before. Literally today we have, in our data center, many hundreds of thousands of servers, and in the future we’ll have many millions of those servers.