Salesforce.com: 1,000 Servers at Equinix

TechCrunch noted yesterday that Salesforce.com (CRM) says it runs its entire operation on just 1,000 servers, of which 500 are used to mirror data. "Think about that for a minute," Erick Schonfeld writes. "Salesforce has more than 55,000 enterprise customers, 1.5 million individual subscribers, 30 million lines of third-party code, and hundreds of terabytes of data all running on 1,000 machines. ... All of Salesforce relies on data stored in only ten databases that run on about 50 servers."

But where do these 1,000 servers live? Salesforce.com's operations are concentrated in a single West Coast data center, with customer data mirrored at an East Coast site. Salesforce.com describes its data center operations in a recent SEC filing.

"As of January 31, 2009, we serve our customers and users from a single, third-party Web hosting facility located on the west coast of the United States, leased from Equinix, Inc.," the company says in its 10k filing. "Our agreement with Equinix provides for Equinix to supply space in its secure facilities on the west and east coasts as well as power. ... As part of our current disaster recovery arrangements, all of our customers’ data is currently replicated in near real-time in a separate back-up facility located on the east coast of the United States. This strategy is designed to both protect our customers’ data and ensure service continuity in the event of a major disaster. Even with the disaster recovery arrangements, our service could be interrupted."

Salesforce.com says it also has a data center in San Francisco, which it uses primarily for internal information technology, development and quality assurance infrastructure.

The company says it is building its first international data center in Singapore, which is expected to go live before the end of fiscal 2010, and will service the rapidly growing international customer base for its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications and hosting. Salesforce.com also announced plans to establish a Network Operations Center (NOC) in Singapore to implement 24×7, follow-the-sun monitoring of the company’s data centers in North America and Singapore.

The Singapore facility is likely within a new data center under construction by Equinix, which is scheduled to come online this year.