Are you curious how they do IT?
The Microsoft corporate Web site, Microsoft.com, is one of the largest and most heavily visited sites on the Internet, yet it maintains consistently high availability ratings. The team that operates the site meets these demands through a combination of carefully planned infrastructure; collaboration with other teams; and use of technology for maintenance, monitoring, and change management.
During the past eight years, Microsoft.com has achieved one of the highest rankings on the Internet in terms of site availability as measured by Keynote Systems Inc., an independent third party. According to the Keynote reports, Microsoft.com has been available more than 99.8 percent of the time for the past five consecutive years, and more than 99.9 percent of the time for the past two years. The site generates more than 1.2 billion hits per day from more than 57 million unique Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. This traffic generates 200 million daily page views, averages 30,000 Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests per second, and results in an average of 750,000 concurrent client connections.
Well Microsoft has published a white paper on their infrastructure and provide some insight into how they keep one of the most visited sites on the Internet up and running.
Overview of MSCOM Ops Infrastructure Design
Maintaining High Availability for Microsoft.com
The intended audience for this white paper is IT Managers, Website Managers, IT Pros, business decisions makers for Web strategy, and CIO’s.
I think most anyone in the field would enjoy reading this.