Blizzard Offers Look Inside WoW At GDC 188
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."
Story at 11... (Score:5, Funny)
Massive online game requires massive ammount of servers, bandwidth and people to maintain.....
Re:Story at 11... (Score:4, Funny)
With wild abandonment?
Re:Story at 11... (Score:4, Funny)
+5 He-Man And The Masters Of The Obvious!!1
All I read... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well, Look at Their Monthly Revenue (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Story at 11... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Story at 11... (Score:2, Funny)
You do not need such massive infrastructure to run a MMO, its just being wasteful about resources. Sure, the uptime could suffer a little bit and its possible you would sometimes run over the allowed bandwidth with Comcast, but you CAN run these things just fine on your living room behind the TV. If you want redundancy, you could have another server at your friends place.
Just because its "cool" and you have some money, it doesn't mean you have to waste it. Hell, even Slashdot runs just fine on CmdrTaco's mom's basement..
Re:Bosses (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Yeah. You say that now. Then you'll get a job where your boss is a programmer, and it'll be like "Why haven't you finished that task yet? I could have done that in 2 hours, and you've been 6...", and no matter how much you argue about how long such a task takes, you'll never win, because he'll _know_ exactly where your time is going [xkcd.com].
Imagine what these guys are like... (Score:4, Funny)
I wonder what those two guys are like. I'm pretty sure they must be nerds of EPIC proportions. And I don't mean that in a mean way, I'm just sayin....
Re:Story at 11... (Score:5, Funny)
All you need is a post-it note saying "do not turn off!! SERVER!!!!"
Ob. ctrl-alt-del (Score:4, Funny)
How it REALLY happens behind closed doors:
http://ctrlaltdel-online.com/comic.php?d=20090916 [ctrlaltdel-online.com]
Weather Stations (Score:2, Funny)
a data core that even has televisions tuned to the weather stations.
That the night shift promptly changes to Family Guy at 8 PM when everyone else goes home.
Re:Story at 11... (Score:2, Funny)