How big is a cloud?

Question

I'm trying to come up with some data on how many much computing power the current cloud platforms represent. (Microsoft Azure, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Google App Engine. Others?)

Stuff like how many physical/virtual machines, storage space. How many datacentres are the big players setting up/running already. Any metrics would be fine.

(Also, if you know of any pictures of the server-containers or related, please link to them.)

Quantifying and visualizing it will help me better explain what the cloud is all about.

Answer 1

Hard to know, you would imagine most of the data would be kept secret by the main players. Here's a blog post with pics of a new Microsoft data-centre in Chicago - pretty massive!

http://blogs.msdn.com/stevecla01/archive/2009/06/30/two-more-microsoft-mega-datacenters-next-month.aspx

But who knows what that gets used for, probably loads of services, not just Azure.

Answer 2

Here's a vid tour of a google data center