Amazon Quietly Amasses Cloud Power with Huge Number of Servers, Data Centers

Today, many businesses face similar infrastructure challenges, such as under-used servers and over-provisioned storage, time and money spent on infrastructure management and non-stop business demands. For a high-functioning data center to truly meet budget requirements, management costs need to remain stable.

These are well-known aspects of what motivates companies to adopt cloud computing today. What’s less well-known is who owns the majority of cloud infrastructure data centers. While it’s difficult to point to one company, Amazon has long been suspected of having a huge number of servers powering its cloud data centers.

The company provides services and secure technology, proven successful in thousands of companies around the world. They offer software that provides a central point of integration that helps consolidate management, reduces deployment time/costs and facilitates collaboration between diverse data processing and network silos. Gartner researcher Lydia Leong estimates that Amazon’s cloud business was $1 billion in 2011, more than five times the size of Rackspace (News - Alert), its closest competitor.

According to John Engates, Rackspace Chief Technology Officer, the company has 80,000 servers in his data centers. But only 23 percent ($189 million) of Rackspace’s 2011 business was in the cloud. The company stored 762 billion objects in its S3 storage cloud last year – three times the 2010 tally, and Amazon is said to have increased the number of IP addresses assigned to servers in those data centers more than fivefold in the past two years.

These are interesting figures that help analysts approximate Amazon’s true size. Last month Accenture’s (News - Alert) Huan Liu did a bit of internet sleuthing, and came up with a guess as to Amazon’s number of servers: 445,000.

So what is the significance of Amazon owning such a high proportion of the cloud today? Some equate it with the inequality that was brought to the nation’s attention by the Occupy movements and the focus on the 99 percent versus the one percent. Amazon is quietly becoming “a massive utility” that is either on the sending or receiving end of one percent of all of the internet traffic in North America, and that has some sitting up and taking notice.