Behind the Scenes At Sony's NOC

VonGuard writes "Earlier this year, I spoke to Mark Rizzo, the man who manages the people who run Sony's online game servers. Rizzo learned the ropes of MMO hosting back on Ultima Online, and we chatted about where the tough problems were then versus now. Rizzo compares the operation to a 24/7 scientific simulation, albeit with some sassier and more involved end-users. His favorite innovation since those early days? Rapidly provisioning and deploying Linux installations tailor-made to their purposes. Here's my article on Rizzo and his band of 50-some-odd sysadmin-cum-dungeon-masters, written for the new newspaper The Systems Management News."

Re:Would love to hear more from these teams

[magamiako1]

Jellybob:

As I stated, I implied that the environment is very high demand. It's not quite like every other datacenter environment in terms of a systems architecture point of view because of the nature of the data.

Just from a systems architecture point of view, and pardon if I'm not too well versed in database architecture as some others--but in the community version of MySQL there are multiples of ways to do backups and database tracking for recovery if needed. One of which is is how to track the database data in the event of a database failure. You can backup the SQL database files, but what if the data hadn't been paged out to disk yet? Stuck in cache somewhere that got erased when the machine powered off?

This sort of issue might not be too big of a deal if Joe Schmoe's forum user account needs to be restored from a backup, but it's a big problem when his game character loses a very important item that he just obtained or an achievement he received.

And while of course that might not be a "big problem" to you because it's a video game and "nobody should care that much", it's still a big data problem nonetheless that puts it on par with say, medical information on a patient that didn't get stored properly.

Linux?

[wilder_card]

So Linux is good enough for the servers, but no one can be bothered to make the client compatible with Linux. Wouldn't be hard thanks to Wine, but nope.

Re:What change management?

[Zen]

Did we read the same article? They use BMC Remedy along with some homegrown stuff.