看看中国互联网巨头和他们的超大规模

原文地址：http://gigaom.com/2013/01/09/a-p ... heir-massive-scale/
原创翻译：龙腾网 www.ltaaa.com 翻译：壞得彻底 转载请注明出处
正文翻译:
原创翻译：龙腾网 www.ltaaa.com 翻译：壞得彻底 转载请注明出处
本帖论坛地址：http://www.ltaaa.com/bbs/thread-130316-1-1.html

China’s big four internet companies are huge, in fact — but they’re not yet technological innovators like their American counterparts. However, scalability is an an issue that knows no borders, which has spurred some cross-continental cooperation. Will it also inspire a Chinese tech awakening?

中国的四大互联网公司规模庞大，实际上他们不像美国同行那样是技术创新者。然而可扩性是没有边界的，这促发了一些跨大陆的合作。这会不会同时激发中国技术的觉醒呢？

Here’s the thing about China: It’s very, very big. And although the Great Firewall cuts its citizens off from many popular U.S. web services, those citizens still exist. In fact, there are more of them than all the citizens of the United States and European Union combined. And they use social media and e-commerce just like the rest of us.

中国非常非常大。尽管防火墙阻断了他的公民获得许多美国流行网站服务的途径，这些需求服务的用户仍然存在。事实上他们的数量超过美国和欧洲的总和。他们像我们一样使用社会媒体和电子商务。

It should come as no surprise, then, that the companies serving the country’s 1.3 billion people with their social media, e-commerce and information-discovery needs are very, very big, too. Here are some statistics that demonstrate their scale.

不应该感到惊讶的是，四大企业利用社会媒体、电子商务、信息挖掘来服务这个国家的13亿人，需要很大很大的规模。这里用一些统计资料说明他们的规模。

Alibaba Group
Taobao, the eBay-like e-commerce line of business from Chinese internet giant Alibaba Group, does a lot of business. On a single day — Nov. 11, 2011 — the company did a whopping 19 billion Yuan (or approximately $3.05 billion) in sales. According to Alibaba Group CTO and Alibaba Cloud Computing President Wang Jian, the company site surpassed the 1 trillion Yuan (about $160 billion) mark for 2012 revenue at the end of November. Alipay, the company’s version of PayPal, handles about 3 billion Yuan (about $480 million) in transactions every day.

阿里巴巴集团
淘宝，类似eBay的电子商务，是中国互联网巨头阿里巴巴集团众多业务中的一个。仅在一天--2011.11.11--这家企业销售额到达了惊人的190亿元（约30.5亿美元）。据阿里巴巴首席技术官和云计算总裁王坚所说，公司网站在十一月末销售总额突破一万亿元（约1600亿美元）。支付宝，这家公司的PayPal版本，每天处理30亿元（约4.8亿美元）的交易。

By comparison, eBay posted $3.4 billion in revenue for the entire third-quarter this year. Amazon.com, with which Taobao also competes (although Alibaba also has a business-to-consumer division called Tmall), closed its third quarter with $13.8 billion in revenue.

相比之下，eBay宣布其今年第三季度的销售总额为34亿美元。亚马逊，同样也是淘宝的竞争对手（尽管阿里巴巴也有一个称为天猫的B2C部门），其第三季度销售总额为138亿美元。

Of course, Taobao and Alipay are just two of Alibaba’s expansive portfolio of services, which includes a much-publicized (although recently reduced) partnership with Yahoo.

当然，淘宝和支付宝只是阿里巴巴大规模事业群中的两个，这个事业群还包括大作宣传的（虽然最近减弱了）其与雅虎的合作公司。

That type of business means Aliaba needs a lot of servers. In a single year not too long ago, Jian told me, the company bought more servers than it had in previous five years combined. If you charted Alibaba’s server count now versus five years ago, he added, the previous number would look like zero. How big is its database? Enough to store data for more than 800 million items for sale.

这种企业类型意味着阿里巴巴需要很多的服务器。在不久前的一年，王坚告诉我这家企业购买了比过去五年数量之和还多的服务器。他补充说，如果你绘制阿里巴巴现在与五年前拥有的服务器数量图表，五年前的看起来就像零一样。它的数据库有多大？能够存储超过8亿件商品的数据。

Baidu
The Chinese search giant is ranked fifth in the Alexa internet rankings (behind Facebook Google, YouTube and Yahoo), which is evidence of its popularity. All those users, I’m told, result in an annual server growth approximately equal to the previous three years combined. It has been reported that Baidu is planning possibly the world’s largest data center — spanning 120,000 square meters, costing $1.6 billion, housing 100,000 servers (totaling 700,000 CPUs and 3 million cores) and storing 4,000 petabytes of data.

百度
这家中国搜索引擎巨头在Alexa 互联网排名中位于第五（在Facebook、谷歌、Youtube、雅虎之后），这证明了他有多么流行。每年它的服务器的增长大致相当于前三年的总和。据报道，百度可能正规划世界上最大的数据中心--跨越12万平方米，耗资16亿美元，10万台服务器（总共70万个CPU与300万个核），存储4000PB的数据。

（译注：Alexa 是免费提供网站流量信息的公司；1PB=1024TB，千万亿字节）

Tencent
Somtimes compared with Facebook in the United States (although it’s actually quite different), Tencent boasted more than 717 million users for its popular QQ messaging service as of September 2011. That number has surely grown. The company says its highest-ever number of concurrent users was more than 176 million, although there are often tens of millions (if not more than 100 million people) using it at any given time. An individual with some knowledge of the company’s infrastructure told me Tencent adds about 100,000 servers per year.

腾讯
在美国有时候会将其与Facebook相比（实际上它们完全不同），腾讯即时通讯服务QQ在2011年11月有超过7.17亿用户，这个数字无疑已经增长了。该公司表示最高同时在线人数超过1.76亿人，虽然经常有数千万人（如果不超过一亿人）在任何时间使用它。一个了解这家企业基础设施的人告诉我腾讯每年要增加约10万台服务器。

Weibo
Weibo, the Twitter-like platform from internet new-school internet company Sina had more than 400 million users as of April 2012. That’s about twice the number Twitter claims. And the Chinese use Weibo a lot, for everything to micro-blogging . It might actually be a more important tool in China than Twitter is in the United States, sources told me, because while the government can censor official news outlets, it can’t possibly control the stream of information coming off Weibo. And that will mean even more growth.

微博
微博，一个类似于推特的平台，在2012年四月已有超过4亿的用户，这大约是推特声称的两倍。中国人经常使用它来发布微小博客。相比较于推特在美国，微博在中国实际上可能是更重要的工具。这是因为政府可以审查官方新闻机构，但他不可能控制微博的信息流动。这将引起更多的用户增长。

Not (yet) innovators
However, despite their sheer scale, Chinese internet companies are, by most accounts, less technologically inclined than their American counterparts. The biggest reason — one I heard time and time again — is that these companies tend to view themselves as traditional businesses rather than technology companies, and that employees often strive to work up the management ladder rather than remain career engineers. This inevitably affects R&D budgets, makes companies less willing to take risks and reduces the pool of employees that really, deeply understand complex

不是创新者
然而，尽管具有庞大的规模，中国互联网公司对大多数人来说，比美国同行更少的倾向于技术。最大的原因——我听说了一次又一次--是这些公司倾向于将自己视为传统企业而非科技公司，而且员工力争成为管理阶层而不是毕生为一名工程师。这必然影响研发预算，使公司不情愿冒险，员工不会深入研究复杂的系统。

However, maybe these companies are coming around on innovation beyond just buying more-efficient gear. Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba, for example, are all members of the Facebook-led Open Compute Project for designing webscale hardware. Tencent and Baidu actually created their own rack-design specification, called Project Scorpio, that is being merged into Open Compute’s Open Rack design in 2013. They still don’t build their own servers like Google and Facebook do, preferring instead to push their custom specs on server makers, but many innovative American companies, including eBay, do the same thing.

然而，或许这些公司正在醒悟。他们不在只是购买更多的高效设备。例如，腾讯，百度和阿里巴巴都是为设计webscale硬件而成立的Facebook OCP的成员。腾讯和百度事实上已经创造了他们自己的统一的rack-design规格，这被称为天蝎计划，这项计划会在2013年被合并到Open Compute’s Open Rack design 中去。他们仍不是像谷歌和Facebook那样建立自己的服务器，而是向服务器厂商定制服务器规格。许多创新型美国公司包括eBay，也如同他们那样做。

（译注：Open Compute Project，Facebook于2011年4月启动作为自己的分配式服务器设计，但是为了寻求更广泛参于，该公司于2011年10月为该项目成立了自己的基金会。）

One has to assume that a closer working relationship between engineers at American and Chinese internet companies will spur even more changes in the tech culture there. Although technical talent comes relatively cheap in China, perhaps they’ll realize that highly skilled, forward-thinking engineers (and data scientists, for that matter) are something worth hanging onto and rewarding with high salaries.

有人认为在中美互联网公司的工程师之间，密切的工作关系将促进中国科技文化更多的改变。虽然在中国科技人才相当便宜，或许他们会认识到技术精湛、有远见的工程师（数据科学家）是值得抓住不放和获得高报酬的。

As Facebook VP Frank Frankovsky told PCWorld in July as the Open Rack designs were unveiled, “We compete with those guys, but on the infrastructure side, if we can make our infrastructure more efficient, it makes everyone that much better. Where we differentiate our business is in the service we provide to our end users.”

在七月当 Open Rack 揭开神秘面纱的时候，Facebook副总裁Frank Frankovsky告诉《PCWorld》，“虽然我们与这些企业竞争，但是在基础设施方面，如果我们能使我们的设施更加高效，也将使其他企业的设施同样如此。在给最终用户提供服务的阶段，我们将此和我们的商业行为区别对待。

That differentiation comes from in large part from an incredible investment in research and technology. If they want to be considered thought leaders in their field — and if they want to expand significantly into cloud computing (as Alibaba and Sina clearly want to do) — China’s internet companies will have to start matching their immense scale with demonstrated technological prowess.

这种区别对待很大程度上是因为在研究与技术上难以置信的巨大投资。如果他们想在自己的领域中成为受尊敬的思想领袖--如果他们想深入发展云计算（阿里巴巴、新浪明显想做到）--中国的互联网公司将不得不证明自己拥有可以匹配其超大规模的科技实力。原文地址：http://gigaom.com/2013/01/09/a-p ... heir-massive-scale/
原创翻译：龙腾网 www.ltaaa.com 翻译：壞得彻底 转载请注明出处
正文翻译:
原创翻译：龙腾网 www.ltaaa.com 翻译：壞得彻底 转载请注明出处
本帖论坛地址：http://www.ltaaa.com/bbs/thread-130316-1-1.html

China’s big four internet companies are huge, in fact — but they’re not yet technological innovators like their American counterparts. However, scalability is an an issue that knows no borders, which has spurred some cross-continental cooperation. Will it also inspire a Chinese tech awakening?

中国的四大互联网公司规模庞大，实际上他们不像美国同行那样是技术创新者。然而可扩性是没有边界的，这促发了一些跨大陆的合作。这会不会同时激发中国技术的觉醒呢？

Here’s the thing about China: It’s very, very big. And although the Great Firewall cuts its citizens off from many popular U.S. web services, those citizens still exist. In fact, there are more of them than all the citizens of the United States and European Union combined. And they use social media and e-commerce just like the rest of us.

中国非常非常大。尽管防火墙阻断了他的公民获得许多美国流行网站服务的途径，这些需求服务的用户仍然存在。事实上他们的数量超过美国和欧洲的总和。他们像我们一样使用社会媒体和电子商务。

It should come as no surprise, then, that the companies serving the country’s 1.3 billion people with their social media, e-commerce and information-discovery needs are very, very big, too. Here are some statistics that demonstrate their scale.

不应该感到惊讶的是，四大企业利用社会媒体、电子商务、信息挖掘来服务这个国家的13亿人，需要很大很大的规模。这里用一些统计资料说明他们的规模。

Alibaba Group
Taobao, the eBay-like e-commerce line of business from Chinese internet giant Alibaba Group, does a lot of business. On a single day — Nov. 11, 2011 — the company did a whopping 19 billion Yuan (or approximately $3.05 billion) in sales. According to Alibaba Group CTO and Alibaba Cloud Computing President Wang Jian, the company site surpassed the 1 trillion Yuan (about $160 billion) mark for 2012 revenue at the end of November. Alipay, the company’s version of PayPal, handles about 3 billion Yuan (about $480 million) in transactions every day.

阿里巴巴集团
淘宝，类似eBay的电子商务，是中国互联网巨头阿里巴巴集团众多业务中的一个。仅在一天--2011.11.11--这家企业销售额到达了惊人的190亿元（约30.5亿美元）。据阿里巴巴首席技术官和云计算总裁王坚所说，公司网站在十一月末销售总额突破一万亿元（约1600亿美元）。支付宝，这家公司的PayPal版本，每天处理30亿元（约4.8亿美元）的交易。

By comparison, eBay posted $3.4 billion in revenue for the entire third-quarter this year. Amazon.com, with which Taobao also competes (although Alibaba also has a business-to-consumer division called Tmall), closed its third quarter with $13.8 billion in revenue.

相比之下，eBay宣布其今年第三季度的销售总额为34亿美元。亚马逊，同样也是淘宝的竞争对手（尽管阿里巴巴也有一个称为天猫的B2C部门），其第三季度销售总额为138亿美元。

Of course, Taobao and Alipay are just two of Alibaba’s expansive portfolio of services, which includes a much-publicized (although recently reduced) partnership with Yahoo.

当然，淘宝和支付宝只是阿里巴巴大规模事业群中的两个，这个事业群还包括大作宣传的（虽然最近减弱了）其与雅虎的合作公司。

That type of business means Aliaba needs a lot of servers. In a single year not too long ago, Jian told me, the company bought more servers than it had in previous five years combined. If you charted Alibaba’s server count now versus five years ago, he added, the previous number would look like zero. How big is its database? Enough to store data for more than 800 million items for sale.

这种企业类型意味着阿里巴巴需要很多的服务器。在不久前的一年，王坚告诉我这家企业购买了比过去五年数量之和还多的服务器。他补充说，如果你绘制阿里巴巴现在与五年前拥有的服务器数量图表，五年前的看起来就像零一样。它的数据库有多大？能够存储超过8亿件商品的数据。

Baidu
The Chinese search giant is ranked fifth in the Alexa internet rankings (behind Facebook Google, YouTube and Yahoo), which is evidence of its popularity. All those users, I’m told, result in an annual server growth approximately equal to the previous three years combined. It has been reported that Baidu is planning possibly the world’s largest data center — spanning 120,000 square meters, costing $1.6 billion, housing 100,000 servers (totaling 700,000 CPUs and 3 million cores) and storing 4,000 petabytes of data.

百度
这家中国搜索引擎巨头在Alexa 互联网排名中位于第五（在Facebook、谷歌、Youtube、雅虎之后），这证明了他有多么流行。每年它的服务器的增长大致相当于前三年的总和。据报道，百度可能正规划世界上最大的数据中心--跨越12万平方米，耗资16亿美元，10万台服务器（总共70万个CPU与300万个核），存储4000PB的数据。

（译注：Alexa 是免费提供网站流量信息的公司；1PB=1024TB，千万亿字节）

Tencent
Somtimes compared with Facebook in the United States (although it’s actually quite different), Tencent boasted more than 717 million users for its popular QQ messaging service as of September 2011. That number has surely grown. The company says its highest-ever number of concurrent users was more than 176 million, although there are often tens of millions (if not more than 100 million people) using it at any given time. An individual with some knowledge of the company’s infrastructure told me Tencent adds about 100,000 servers per year.

腾讯
在美国有时候会将其与Facebook相比（实际上它们完全不同），腾讯即时通讯服务QQ在2011年11月有超过7.17亿用户，这个数字无疑已经增长了。该公司表示最高同时在线人数超过1.76亿人，虽然经常有数千万人（如果不超过一亿人）在任何时间使用它。一个了解这家企业基础设施的人告诉我腾讯每年要增加约10万台服务器。

Weibo
Weibo, the Twitter-like platform from internet new-school internet company Sina had more than 400 million users as of April 2012. That’s about twice the number Twitter claims. And the Chinese use Weibo a lot, for everything to micro-blogging . It might actually be a more important tool in China than Twitter is in the United States, sources told me, because while the government can censor official news outlets, it can’t possibly control the stream of information coming off Weibo. And that will mean even more growth.

微博
微博，一个类似于推特的平台，在2012年四月已有超过4亿的用户，这大约是推特声称的两倍。中国人经常使用它来发布微小博客。相比较于推特在美国，微博在中国实际上可能是更重要的工具。这是因为政府可以审查官方新闻机构，但他不可能控制微博的信息流动。这将引起更多的用户增长。

Not (yet) innovators
However, despite their sheer scale, Chinese internet companies are, by most accounts, less technologically inclined than their American counterparts. The biggest reason — one I heard time and time again — is that these companies tend to view themselves as traditional businesses rather than technology companies, and that employees often strive to work up the management ladder rather than remain career engineers. This inevitably affects R&D budgets, makes companies less willing to take risks and reduces the pool of employees that really, deeply understand complex

不是创新者
然而，尽管具有庞大的规模，中国互联网公司对大多数人来说，比美国同行更少的倾向于技术。最大的原因——我听说了一次又一次--是这些公司倾向于将自己视为传统企业而非科技公司，而且员工力争成为管理阶层而不是毕生为一名工程师。这必然影响研发预算，使公司不情愿冒险，员工不会深入研究复杂的系统。

However, maybe these companies are coming around on innovation beyond just buying more-efficient gear. Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba, for example, are all members of the Facebook-led Open Compute Project for designing webscale hardware. Tencent and Baidu actually created their own rack-design specification, called Project Scorpio, that is being merged into Open Compute’s Open Rack design in 2013. They still don’t build their own servers like Google and Facebook do, preferring instead to push their custom specs on server makers, but many innovative American companies, including eBay, do the same thing.

然而，或许这些公司正在醒悟。他们不在只是购买更多的高效设备。例如，腾讯，百度和阿里巴巴都是为设计webscale硬件而成立的Facebook OCP的成员。腾讯和百度事实上已经创造了他们自己的统一的rack-design规格，这被称为天蝎计划，这项计划会在2013年被合并到Open Compute’s Open Rack design 中去。他们仍不是像谷歌和Facebook那样建立自己的服务器，而是向服务器厂商定制服务器规格。许多创新型美国公司包括eBay，也如同他们那样做。

（译注：Open Compute Project，Facebook于2011年4月启动作为自己的分配式服务器设计，但是为了寻求更广泛参于，该公司于2011年10月为该项目成立了自己的基金会。）

One has to assume that a closer working relationship between engineers at American and Chinese internet companies will spur even more changes in the tech culture there. Although technical talent comes relatively cheap in China, perhaps they’ll realize that highly skilled, forward-thinking engineers (and data scientists, for that matter) are something worth hanging onto and rewarding with high salaries.

有人认为在中美互联网公司的工程师之间，密切的工作关系将促进中国科技文化更多的改变。虽然在中国科技人才相当便宜，或许他们会认识到技术精湛、有远见的工程师（数据科学家）是值得抓住不放和获得高报酬的。

As Facebook VP Frank Frankovsky told PCWorld in July as the Open Rack designs were unveiled, “We compete with those guys, but on the infrastructure side, if we can make our infrastructure more efficient, it makes everyone that much better. Where we differentiate our business is in the service we provide to our end users.”

在七月当 Open Rack 揭开神秘面纱的时候，Facebook副总裁Frank Frankovsky告诉《PCWorld》，“虽然我们与这些企业竞争，但是在基础设施方面，如果我们能使我们的设施更加高效，也将使其他企业的设施同样如此。在给最终用户提供服务的阶段，我们将此和我们的商业行为区别对待。

That differentiation comes from in large part from an incredible investment in research and technology. If they want to be considered thought leaders in their field — and if they want to expand significantly into cloud computing (as Alibaba and Sina clearly want to do) — China’s internet companies will have to start matching their immense scale with demonstrated technological prowess.

这种区别对待很大程度上是因为在研究与技术上难以置信的巨大投资。如果他们想在自己的领域中成为受尊敬的思想领袖--如果他们想深入发展云计算（阿里巴巴、新浪明显想做到）--中国的互联网公司将不得不证明自己拥有可以匹配其超大规模的科技实力。