The appearance of the Microsoft.com Operation Team's Blog (the team that runs the Microsoft.com portal) is one of the greatest and latest news that comes from the "inside" of the Microsoft's family.
They've launched their blog with a simple post where they share with us the numbers that comes from their big portal, numbers that I want to rewrite here for remember:
*.Microsoft.com:
- 3 Data Centers
- 1606 Data Center Servers
- 506 Servers in Labs
- 111 Web Sites
- 1069 Databases
- 1000’s of Web Applications
- 80+Gbit/sec Network Traffic
WWW.Microsoft.com:
- 13 million unique users/day
- 70 million page views per day
- 10,000 requests/sec, 300 concurrent connection on 80 servers
- 350 Vroots
Windows Update/Download:
- 150 million unique client scans/day
- 12,000 ASP.NET requests/sec
- 500K concurrent connections
- 1 Billion Downloads and7 50K client installs in 2 weeks (April 2006)
- 4Gbit/sec Web Site Egress (Web Pages Only…No Downloads)
- 20+ Billion Downloads in 2005…Routinely 150M+/Day
Really impressive... 
P.S. This is the power of blogs... we can be in contact with the core of the Microsoft's Team and know informations that are not revealed by all companies. Microsoft loves blogging and I love this! 