I just read http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/05/14/whos-got-the-most-web-servers/ which discusses how many servers are managed by different service providers. To use a term I recently learned: this is total e-peen. Seriously. With virtualization technology, the number of physical servers becomes less interesting as a metric. And neither physical or virtual servers illustrates the metrics that really count: how many people rely on the provider and the economic or social impact. Not that I have any idea what such a metric would look like, how to adjust for different types of applications, normalize for different software architectures (and efficiency), etc. Maybe for now server-count is the only sort of metric we could hope to agree on. *sigh*
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