Don't know why Liu thought AWS would use blade servers. 1U commodity "pizza box" servers make the most sense by far. In-fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon was making their own servers (see Google http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html)
I agree. I don't know why Liu made that assumption. Most large scale data center operators agree that blades are not a good solution:
1. Not cost effective because they don't benefit from the economy of scale of commodity hardware like pizza box servers.
2. More expensive to operate as they often require redesigning/reinforcing cooling as they concentrate too much power in too little space.
3. The space-saving advantage of blades doesn't address the root of the problem: any data center architect worth his salt will design a data center to be power-constrained, not space-constrained.
Next time, ask them to clarify whether it's physical servers or virtual machines. They could easily have had 500K virtual machines running <100K physical servers.
Rackspace publicly discloses its number of servers.
The latest investor presentation slide deck on the Investor link from the front page of rackspace.com lists the number of customers at 170k+ on 79k+ servers.
"Photos from a 2011 presentation by AWS Distinguished Engineer James Hamilton show 1U “pizza box” rackmount servers rather than blades"
Those look like 2U boxes to me. The slides even talk about a "rack of 20 servers with Top of Rack switch".
And it's been obvious from the start that EC2 instances are subdivisions of larger servers; given the sizes of servers involved, the power distribution and cooling issues would make using blades a nightmare.
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