Slashdot Mirror
Blizzard Offers Look Inside WoW At GDC
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."
Let's say they have 10 million active subscribers world wide and that each of them pays $12 a month. Wouldn't you expect that sort of protection and insane support on something generating $120 million in revenue for you a month? I would. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a whole lot more to it that we don't know about and never will.
My work here is dung.
with only a staff of 68 people
How does it take 68 people to monitor that few servers, and most of them BLADES?!? The writers have apparently never worked in a large network environment (not that I'd expect that they would have, being writers and all). But seriously... that's not really that many servers for a large online service, it really shouldn't take that much work to keep it all running unless it's horribly designed.
Eh well, if they have the cash flow to retain that many warm bags of mostly water, more power to them.
Not much detailing about their data centers. It seemed more of a Blizzard PR piece than anything else, and without technical details, this is just another Blizzard ad. In the MMO world, WoW serves one good purpose, and that is keeping the bad players there, and not bothering the better players elsewhere.
To be worth having this on /., it would be nice to know more than just "we haz data centerz". It would be nice to know how many zone servers are used per realm, how they are connected, what database they use (guessing Oracle), and so on. This wouldn't be ruining their security because the blackhats already know all this stuff.
I was alarmed when I was searching for a new bank that the major banks do not offer authenticators or usb dongles to use for online banking for normal consumers. Why can I protect my WoW account better than my bank account?
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.
4,600 employees at Blizzard.
...yes. The hard part of a Massively Multiplayer Online Game does in fact come from the Massively part.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
Then you find the one person who thinks unplugging the power strip to plug it into another outlet will not shut off the computer
Whoosh!
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard