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Blizzard Offers Look Inside WoW At GDC

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the belly-of-the-beast dept.

Yesterday morning at GDC Austin, Blizzard's J. Allen Brack and Frank Pearce took to the stage to finally give a peek inside the inner workings of World of Warcraft. Tipping the scales at around 4,600 people utilizing 20,000 computer systems and 1.3 petabytes of storage, Blizzard has created a raging behemoth. The Online Network services group alone has "data centers from Texas to Seoul, and monitor over 13,250 server blades, 75,000 cpu cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM. [Pearce] points out the picture of the GNOC (Global Network Operations Center) in their slideshow, a data core that even has televisions tuned to the weather stations. They use those to ensure that conditions of the data center are up to their standards; with only a staff of 68 people they ensure connectivity across the globe for the numerous WoW servers."

13 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. Story at 11... by CRiMSON · · Score: 5, Funny

    Massive online game requires massive ammount of servers, bandwidth and people to maintain.....

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    oogly boogly!
    1. Re:Story at 11... by CRiMSON · · Score: 4, Funny

      With wild abandonment?

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      oogly boogly!
    2. Re:Story at 11... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      +5 He-Man And The Masters Of The Obvious!!1

    3. Re:Story at 11... by NYMeatball · · Score: 2, Funny

      You wouldn't be surprised at the number of people who DO try to run application servers underneath their own desk in the corporate world.

    4. Re:Story at 11... by sopssa · · Score: 2, Funny

      You do not need such massive infrastructure to run a MMO, its just being wasteful about resources. Sure, the uptime could suffer a little bit and its possible you would sometimes run over the allowed bandwidth with Comcast, but you CAN run these things just fine on your living room behind the TV. If you want redundancy, you could have another server at your friends place.

      Just because its "cool" and you have some money, it doesn't mean you have to waste it. Hell, even Slashdot runs just fine on CmdrTaco's mom's basement..

    5. Re:Story at 11... by OakDragon · · Score: 5, Funny

      You wouldn't be surprised at the number of people who DO try to run application servers underneath their own desk in the corporate world.

      All you need is a post-it note saying "do not turn off!! SERVER!!!!"

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      Dark Reflection
    6. Re:Story at 11... by KermitJunior · · Score: 2, Funny

      For instance, I live on the 7th floor, hence that is where my desk is. I know for a fact four people below me have their desk (and computers) directly under mine, and I'm not evening asking to maximize the machines that will fit there.

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      There is a Universal Life Value Check it
  2. All I read... by lazorz · · Score: 5, Funny

    Additional instances cannot be launched.

  3. Re:Well, Look at Their Monthly Revenue by The+Clockwork+Troll · · Score: 5, Funny

    With currency exchange rates fluctuating so frequently, Blizzard has to allow for the possibility that in Russia, World of Warcraft subscribes to you.

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    There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
  4. Re:Bosses by julesh · · Score: 2, Funny

    Apparently the programmer's boss is also a programmer, the artists boss an artist and they are expected to work together. So so SOOOO much better than the bureaucrats most of us get stuck with.

    Yeah. You say that now. Then you'll get a job where your boss is a programmer, and it'll be like "Why haven't you finished that task yet? I could have done that in 2 hours, and you've been 6...", and no matter how much you argue about how long such a task takes, you'll never win, because he'll _know_ exactly where your time is going.

  5. Imagine what these guys are like... by dan_sdot · · Score: 3, Funny

    The creative development team is the hub for the company's history. They have two full-time lore historians, keepers of blizzard's past. They are the liaisons with the novelists, work to create shared art resources, act as an archive for every piece of art that's been created for Blizzard Entertainment, and currently maintain 100,000 art assets.

    I wonder what those two guys are like. I'm pretty sure they must be nerds of EPIC proportions. And I don't mean that in a mean way, I'm just sayin....

  6. Ob. ctrl-alt-del by DarthVain · · Score: 3, Funny

    How it REALLY happens behind closed doors:

    http://ctrlaltdel-online.com/comic.php?d=20090916

  7. Weather Stations by danielk82 · · Score: 2, Funny

    a data core that even has televisions tuned to the weather stations.

    That the night shift promptly changes to Family Guy at 8 PM when everyone else goes home.