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A Look At One of Blizzard's Retired World of Warcraft Servers
MojoKid writes "At last count, Activision Blizzard pegged the number of World of Warcraft subscribers at 10.2 million. It takes a massive amount of gear to host all the different game worlds, or realms, as they're referred to. Each realm is hosted on its own server, and in late 2011, Activision Blizzard began auctioning off retired server blades from the days of yore to benefit the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. They sold around 2,000 retired Hewlett-Packard p-Class server blades on eBay and donated 100 percent of the proceeds (minus auction expenses) to the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, which seeks to advance the treatment and prevention of catastrophic diseases in children. This article has a look at one of those retired server blades."
For the Horde, I mean, FOR THE CHILDREN!
With shipping, which was almost as much as the server itself, I paid $243.50 for this showpiece.
Hmmm $100 or so to ship? Someone's padding that expense line. I would not flinch at $25 to $50 but this smells of those ebay auctions where its $0.01 for the product and $50 to ship.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Are we still using blades? They save physical space but they add complexity, cost, points of failure, and the heat they generate is the same (or worse) per performance, all concentrated in a tiny box with higher cooling demands. New Xeons and Opterons have buttloads of CPU cores and then you just visualize shit. Why mess with blades?
It looks like any other blade, once you ignore the marketing decals put on it.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
From the slide show/article it says the drives were removed before hand to prevent customer info from being leaked.
I'm wondering why these had hard drives with data on them at all. Wouldn't the data be on a SAN on the backend? Kind of defeats the purpose of a blade in the first place, seeing you want to be able to replace it quick if something goes wrong.
In fact, if there are using the local drives, they better be sure to remove the RAID controller, as these might have info left in the cache as they are battery backed up.
The article writer doesn't mention the specs of the blade, isn't interested in knowing if it works and thinks its ugly?! He has no interest in server tech or playing wow. Why waste our time linking to this article?
Oh man, where was the news story when these were still for sale?! $200 for a blade server doesn't sound bad, but then you look at the work they did with the paneling and the plaque and this thing looks like a pretty sweet piece. Practically belongs in a museum! $200 seems like a steal.
:(
I want one
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
It only makes sense to employ people if you have a job for them to do. If Blizzard had nothing useful for them to do, keeping them around to twiddle their thumbs doesn't make much sense.
I get the feeling their backend design wasn't the best. For years they took their servers down every single week for a massive 6-8 hour maintenance period. This wasn't for updates, this was just regular. Patches took forEVER to happen. It clearly wasn't something like "Take things down, roll out new code, run checks, bring it online." Given that some things would only affect particular realms it was pretty clear they were doing things like running series of scripts and commands to upgrade things, and the process shad trouble in certain configurations and so on.
So it wouldn't surprise me if they did things like store data on the blades themselves and so on. I can't say for sure, since Blizzard has been secretive to the point of paranoia about how things work on the back end, but my experience with the game leads me to believe they did not have a particularly good backend setup.
Before reselling them they had to clean the hard drives of all the lost hopes and dreams of previous players.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Blizzard is a for-profit company, not a charity. Why payroll 500 of your worst developers when you can pay 50 to do the same job for a fifth the price(assuming you pay them more and benefits are a flat per-head rate)?
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Do you understand how the concept of tax rates work? Let's say, for argument's sake, that Blizzard's corporate tax rate, is 30%. They sell a server for $250, and spend $100 of that money to ship it. They then donate the remaining $150 to charity. Assuming, then, that they could write off the $250, that means they save $75 on their taxes. So, let's look at it. They take in $250, they pay $100 for shipping, pay $150 to charities, and get to keep $75 of that. Sounds great, right? Amazing moneygrab from the company that's making about $153 million a month in subscription costs. Now, let's suppose that they were the capitalist scoundrels that you're alleging they are (given, they do a lot of things to grab money, but framing this as one of them is silly). They sell the server at auction for the same $250. They pay $100 of that to ship it. Let's assume, again, that they can write off shipping in the costs. So boom, they save $30 on taxes. $250 in income, $30 in saved taxes, minus $100 for the shipping cost. They've then gained $180. So effectively, even after the tax implications are figured, they still could have earned more money by keeping the money for themselves than giving it to charity. How dare those scumbags give the money to a hospital for kids.
from TFA:"There may never be another game as popular as WoW, and even if there is, at the very least WoW will always be considered the first mega-successful MMORPG." I'm surprised that no one has challenged this yet. I think WoW became more popular at it's high point, but I think Everquest paved the way for it, and was as popular at it is now. EQ certainly eclipsed the stuff like Ultima Online and Baldur's Gate that preceded it.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Kudos Blizzard for doing such a decent thing, couldn't have picked a better charity.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It just doesn't feel like it says that much and there are tons of pictures of basically the same thing. Talk about padding it out for ad revenue.
I looked at the auctions when they originally occured
they were shipped INDIVIDUALLY from France, so the price ain't that bad
Now, WHY TF they weren't shipped to one point in the US (say Blizzard headquarters) and then individually shipped to buyers-- escapes me.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
It only makes sense to employ people if you have a job for them to do. If Blizzard had nothing useful for them to do, keeping them around to twiddle their thumbs doesn't make much sense.
This.
I play paper and pencil games with someone who had his department basically cut in half.
Over the past few months a lot of their tasks were made more automated and they were being sent home early due to a lack of work.
Apparently there was a cost/productivity metric that was calculated for each of them and the more expensive ones were let go.
And according to him, the severance packages were nice enough that it was clear that this was not a 'we can't afford you any more' type situation.
I am extremely pleased that Blizzard provided a nice severance package, and extremely pleased that employees of a company that services an MMORPG are themselves fans of pen and paper roleplaying games. Cool.
I'm pro union and borderline socialist myself, but I can't see asking or forcing companies to employ people they can't use. I hope your friend and everyone else laid off finds gainful employment elsewhere.
I agree with your logic. If supply side economics worked, all of the economic growth from 2002 to 2007 would have been from something other than a real estate bubble. Not to mention the insane logic behind keeping taxes low when the nation is at war. But what do I know, I'm just some idiot on a discussion board.
Yes, but why not take those human resources and keep making product? I guess when you have all the money you will ever need for mountains of blow and acres of hookers, one doesn't care about further progress.
Take the Red Pill.
Alot of people were bidding ours up at the last second. They all ended up going for around $500 each.
I also saw alot of negative feedback on the auctions saying "--------------- fuck I didn't want this I just wanted to bid people up. thank god they cancelled my winning bid."
"Fun fact: As of 2010, the average number of hours spent playing WoW each week in America is 22.7"
Over 3 hours per day is average? No wonder I get my arse kicked in PvP. ;)
Am I the only one who doesn't think of pictures when someone says they are having a look at the server? I mean he literally just took pictures of the hardware?!
I'm interested in knowing which realm it was for?
Was it a US or Oceanic server?
I'm just curious.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
a beowulf cluster of these.
For many companies in many situations you are right but there are lots of cases where the grandparent has a point. Look at the way Microsoft does it. They "donate" copies of Microsoft windows. This costs them practically nothing (the marginal cost is e.g. the DVD; nowadays they probably don't even have to provide that, just a sticker) but can be tax-deducted at full value. Further to that, low cost computer installations would often be done with Linux if Windows cost money, so they actually increase their software monopoly by doing it.
The key question, at this point, is what would be the cost of disposal of the blades? Most companies I have seen pay considerable amounts to get rid of old hardware. If that's true in this case it could be even worse than Microsoft. They would not just be stealing the tax-deduction from the tax payer, but also planning to dump the cost of hardware disposal on them when the purchasers finally simply throw away the blades.
This can make sense if the servers have real value and/or if Blizzard or the original vendor, HP, is going to pick up the disposal costs at the end as they should; however, all cases of corporate "generosity" have to be really really carefully looked over. This is a win even for the good/honest companies since it means they get the real credit they deserve rather than being compared with the likes of Microsoft.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
As far as I am aware 'handling user complaints' is not the same as creating new content, and you probably want different people creating content than those who spend most of their day dealing with complaints about Chinese gold farmers.
I don't know, a game with beating down Chinese gold farmers has appeal.
Take the Red Pill.