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Engineering Everquest
The IEEE Spectrum site has an article up discussing the engineering required to keep Norrath running. From the article: "The Death Star is a huge, warm, windowless room containing the rows and rows of servers that run Sony's online games. The whooshing of a massive air-conditioning system is so loud that conversation is almost impossible. A large steel cage surrounds more than 500 servers stacked 32 high in towering racks--and this is just one battalion, albeit the largest, in Sony's 1500-machine army of servers."
Remember, though, that Raph Koster mentioned in an article linked in another Slashdot post that servers devote roughly 40% of their processing time to pathfinding for NPCs. (The stat was for SWG in particular, though it likely applies to most games with the same NPC-to-PC ratio).
The print version of the article has a picture of the server cluster and the Death Star.
Your local library may receive a subscription, but if you live near a university that offers electical or computer engineering degrees you might have better luck contacting the campus library.