The final keynote at MMS was Debra Chrapaty, Microsoft's Corporate VP of Windows Live Operations, speaking about all those data centers Microsoft has been visibly building. Debra is getting increasing exposure as Microsoft rolls out Live services (Debra is also scheduled to speak at the upcoming Google developer meeting). She's a delight to listen to if you get a chance (accurately describes herself as a WYSIWYG kind of person). She confirmed the sense I got from talking to the Cloud Data Services team at MIX 2008 -- it's definitely game on in terms of services. Debra said MS is adding 10,000 servers a month. The MS total server count is much smaller than Google's -- maybe a third of a million to GOOG's 2M -- but to paraphrase Everett Dirksen, 10,000 servers here, 10,000 servers there, after a while it starts to add up to real compute power! The next 18 months are going to be fun to watch not to mention to experience.
