back to article Microsoft: Azure now holds FOUR TREELLION objects

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 …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

    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?

    1. Phoenix50
      Stop

      Re: Smells decidedly fishy

      Of course it "smells decidely fishy" - it's a Microsoft announcement and Microsoft can do NOTHING right on the Register forums can they?

      EVER.

      1. Ken Hagan Gold badge

        Re: Microsoft can do NOTHING right

        Well if they don't define what an object is then claiming that they have more of them really doesn't amount to a hill of beans.

        In other news: I have 5 trillion objects in a piece of snot stuck up my nose. Beat that!

        1. Watching Clouds

          Re: Microsoft can do NOTHING right

          In reading the original post from Microsoft they do define what an object is in that post.

  2. Ben 50
    Meh

    But do you trust these numbers?

    ...just saying.

    1. h4rm0ny

      Re: But do you trust these numbers?

      Whose? Those from Amazon or Microsoft? They're both massive corporations.

      But yes, the numbers are probably accurate. Now tell me, do you trust the word 'object'?

  3. Marco van de Voort

    Choice of metric

    Why is this an interesting metric at all?

    Live objects per day/week/month is the interesting metric to gauge the real use, and profit (since people using Azure as a backup serivce at least pay)

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Object, schmobjects

    How many of these objects are in fact components of the Windows OS infested with unique combinations of shitware contracted from the Internet?

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. Tim 11

      Re: Object, schmobjects

      AC has a good point here. After all, a windows installation takes up 10 times as much disk space as MacOS but does that make it 10 times better or just 10 times more inefficient?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Object, schmobjects

        Perhaps I'm hopelessly out of date but I don't think MacOS has anything to do with anything here.

      2. I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects

        Re: Object, schmobjects

        Readjusted for bloat-ware and the fact that Microsoft users never seem to learn (despite every reason to find out) about back-ups.

        How about a Thatcher cheesy grin with a face palm icon on it then?

  5. Lucifer the Morningstar
    Mushroom

    Whos trillion is it? Is it like one of Microsoft MegaBytes or GigaBytes it quotes storage in?

    and come to think of it is it Good Solid British Billion or one of those piddly little American ones?

  6. Blarkon

    Like climate denialists

    Love it around here - it's simply not possible that the figures might be fine - but that it must be some sort of insane black helicopter conspiracy to make Microsoft look good.

  7. Martin Lyne

    Windows platform

    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?

  8. MyHeadIsSpinning
    WTF?

    WTF is Azure?

    Yes I am a user.

  9. Big_Ted

    Hmmmm

    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.

  10. t_lark
    WTF?

    ?

    How did that happen! Were their loads of Microsoft shops desperate for cloud services but refusing to go near an ssh session? They waited 3-4 years until Microsoft made a nice interface in .net for it? Jeez it shows how many sectors are still utterly dependant on XP.

  11. James 100

    Virtual machines?

    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.

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like