Now this is what corporate blogging is supposed to be about.
Today, Rob Emanuel, a Microsoft technology architect, blogged about Microsoft using Hyper-V technology for Microsoft.com. He earlier blogged—and much more briefly—about using Hyper-V Release Candidate 0 for the MSDN and TechNet sites.
Presumably, Rob's post supports today's Hyper-V release to manufacturing. I didn't see the blog post until this morning (it wasn't there at midnight Pacific time), even though it has a time stamp of 4:38 p.m. PDT yesterday. I assume that Rob simply forgot to update. Too many pesky blogging systems label time when a post is created, forcing the blogger to manually update time and date later on.
I love it when Microsoft employee bloggers describe how the company's dog food is caviar—and that's meant as a compliment, by the way. Microsoft is quick to use its own technology, but it's not as fast telling other people about it. That's changing, and Rob's post is indicative of the trend. The best Microsoft case study is Microsoft.
Rob has put together a nice, concise primer, including Microsoft.com site stats and deployed hardware. Companies like Microsoft don't easily disclose this kind of information. There are competitive and even security considerations, which make the post's existence that much more impressive.
As of today, Microsoft has "25 percent of production traffic" running on Hyper-V, Rob blogged. "Based on these results we are ready to fully host www.microsoft.com web servers on Hyper-V and we're targeting end of June for 50 percent of the load. As soon as we complete deployment of our new hardware infrastructure in diverse data centers, we'll complete the full virtualization."
I don't want to excerpt too much from the post, but these statistics are worth calling out: Microsoft.com "handles 15,000 requests per second, 1.2 billion page views per month, and 280M worldwide unique users per month as well as supporting ~5000 content contributors from within the company," Rob blogged. "This site has close to 300GB of content consisting of some seven million individual files on each server."
Microsoft transparency is best when the company opens up the soul of its own IT operations. No case study is better than Microsoft.
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