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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.
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.
...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.