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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."
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?
For the Horde, I mean, FOR THE CHILDREN!
I'm sorry, but as a Blood Elf Mage, I must say this server is pretty lame. Everyone who's anyone plays PvP, not PvE.