Microsoft adding 10,000 new datacenter servers a month

Today's trivia question: How big is Microsoft's back-end services infrastructure?

Microsoft officials won't say how many servers total Microsoft has churning in its various datacenters. But Microsoft's corporate vice president of Global Foundation Services Debra Chrapaty is on record saying Microsoft is adding 10,000 new servers a month.

(Facebook is estimated to have 10,000 servers total, the Data Center Knowledge folks report. In other words, Microsoft is adding one Facebook-worth of new servers every 30 days.)

On a related note, Microsoft has been building out its content-distribution-network (CDN) infrastructure, as well, as noted in a Bill Gates ThinkWeek paper that I excerpted in my Microsoft 2.0 book. Microsoft was already building out in late 2006 its Blue Cloud and CloudDB services to support the hundreds of Microsoft online properties/services it was powering.