Microsoft Azure is the leading cloud solution for those that were living in a cave the last few years and haven’t heard anything 🙂 In order to support millions of users Microsoft had to have really strong hardware resources. Dell is the major supplier and recently we found what specs the Cloud Platform System racks have. Trully amazing if you ask me.

Each rack has

• 512 cores across 32 servers (each with a dual socket Intel Ivy Bridge, E5-2650v2 CPU)
• 8 TB of RAM with 256 GB per server
• 282 TB of usable storage
• 1360 Gb/s of internal rack connectivity
• 560 Gb/s of inter-rack connectivity
• Up to 60 Gb/s connectivity to the external world

A single rack can support up to 2000 VM’s (2 vCPU, 1.75 GB RAM, and 50 GB disk). You can scale up to 8000 VM’s using a full stamp with four of these racks. Of course customers have the flexibility of choosing their VM dimensions, as we have seen with the private preview deployments with CPS.

More here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2014/10/20/unveiling-the-microsoft-cloud-platform-system-powered-by-dell.aspx