"One of the oldest free Web e-mail services, Hotmail relies on more than 10,000 servers spread around the globe to process billions of e-mail transactions per day. What’s interesting is that despite this enormous amount of traffic, Hotmail relies on less than 100 system administrators to manage it all."
Courtesy of Sadagopan I saw this interview with Phil Smoot, an engineer at Hotmail.
I have complained before that the outsourcing definition of "utility computing" does not deliver its economies of scale, does not take advantage of automation - read here.
Phil has to deliver to SLAs which require availability 365x24x7 - given its global mail users. His price is zero - it is a free service. And he has some of the most hostile users in the world - spammers. He has engineered his environment to depend more on automation, rather than labor.
If he can do it so can the outsourcing industry. He provides a very good role model for emerging utility computing scenarios.
