Guy Rosen did an interesting analysis of the number of virtual machines started in Amazon’s cloud. His findings were surprising, at least to me: according to his stats, nearly 50.000 EC2 instances are started daily. But it all depends on the way you look at it; it’s less than one new VM per second. And since I know of a number of companies using EC2 instances to deal with peaks in demand, many of these will be running only a short period of time.
But today I was looking at these numbers in another way: the huge amounts of storage for these VMs. The smallest EC2 instance has 160GB of local disk storage. That means nearly 8 petabytes of storage is provisioned each day in Amazon’s cloud; and possibly more. The 160GB is for a 32-bit system; users wanting a 64-bit machine start at either 350 or 850GB of storage, so the total amount of disk provisioned just for the EC2 machines is probably over 10 petabytes per day.
Petabox unit at the Internet Archive - by gruntzooki
Photo by gruntzooki
Continue reading Amazon provisioning 8 petabytes of storage per day
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