Smells decidedly fishy
What counts as an object and what services are using which, er, services?
I.e. is Azure underpinning Skydrive and Office 365?
A trillion here and a trillion there; pretty soon you're talking about real storage. In a classic peeing-up-the-wall contest Microsoft has said it pees four times higher than Amazon. Actually there are 4.03 trillion objects stored in its Azure Storage cloud compared to 905 billion in Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3). Brad …
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Requires more crap to go with it. Thus: more objects. So, as mentioned before, all the Windows services being run on it, maybe they have rubbish de-duping.. a better metric might be customers per object? External customers.
How about "how much money these services make"?.
I thought Azure got rebranded anyway?
If my employer was to switch to Azure from local storage we would have many millions of letters etc to upload.
By law we have to keep all data, letters etc that could be required to be look at for a period of 15 years, hell we still have the old Vax machines and tapes stored just in case their needed.
Imagine that could be one way of measuring "objects" rather than live data. I can believe Amazon is almost all live data whilst there is a lot of archive on azure along with the rest.
Amazon stores the EC2 virtual machine volume snapshots (but not the volumes themselves, EBS is separate) in S3 behind the scenes, but each is a single large file. If the virtual machines stored either the actual files, or used smaller chunks, that could easily balloon the count enormously. (100k virtual machines, 10 snapshots of each, 1m files - bang, that's a quarter of the 4 trillion straight away!)
Or of course if they're using it to hold the mail and other data for Office 365/Live@Edu, that would account for a huge chunk. Tens of millions of students/staff each with tens of thousands of messages in their mailstore - easy to hit another trillion that way.
Nice to see a bit of competition for Amazon, anyway: I like - and use - S3 myself, but good to know they're not the only big player in the market.