[andridk]

I never would have guessed that so many data centers ran their DHCP off of Microsoft Windows.

[krylon]

Microsoft's Active Directory, DHCP server, and DNS server integrate very closely. When a domain member gets a dynamic IP address, the DHCP server will inform the DNS server to update its record for that host.

Many companies are, let's say a bit lazy - when use an Active Directory domain anyway, you might as well use the DHCP and DNS servers, too, they handle replication and failover very smoothly. (I am not a big fan of Windows, but that part has worked pretty well in my experience.)

You can get a similar mechanism to work between BIND and ISC DHCPD; it's not a lot of work, but with Zeroconf/mDNS it is less useful than it used to be.

[noobface]

Active Directory and DHCP go hand-in-hand. Your Domain Controllers aren't always your DHCP servers, but under a certain scale, they very likely are.

[EvanAnderson]

I'm a 20+ year Windows sysadmin and I don't buy it. If you'd said "Active Directory and DNS go hand-in-hand" I'd agree-- the coupling there is pretty tight (and it's a pain-in-the-ass to run Active Directory with non-Microsoft DNS servers being authoritative for the AD domain name). DHCP is a lot less tightly coupled.

[forgotusername6]

If you create a brand new domain, it will automatically configure it to be the DHCP server by default.

[nfeutry]

I find this number also very surprinsing but it's not really 40% of datacenter, it's 40% of the networks monitored by Akama

[9dev]

Yeah, I thought that too. Akamai seems to be popular with corporations.

[Terretta]

Not the colo themselves running it, "in" datacenters. And more accurately, in networks in datacenters.

Colocation means many clients, and in any given colo there's almost certainly someone running a Windows AD + Microsoft DHCP box, meaning it's "in" that datacenter. I'm surprised as many as 40% of networks still have that tech, but that's enterprise for you. Point being, though, it's likely in well more than 40% of datacenters.

[irq-1]

In the 90s Microsoft tied their dominant Exchange/Outlook to Active Directory which depends on DNS/DHCP.

[steve1977]

Active Directory was officially only released in 2000 though.

[alacode]

Microsoft and Google together are trying to control the largest spectrum of computer usage globally.