A Look At One of Blizzard's Retired World of Warcraft Servers 116
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."
So? (Score:4, Informative)
It looks like any other blade, once you ignore the marketing decals put on it.
Re:shipping cost? (Score:5, Informative)
we ship servers constantly (data center), average cost of actual shipping is around $125 within Canada/US, for a 1U system. They are heavy, require special packaging (2" solid foam surrounding the system to meet insurance requirements) and usually double boxed.
Re:Blades (Score:5, Informative)
Blades are all about density. If I can squeeze 10 dual-host blades in a 7U enclosure, that's 13U saved vs 20 1U servers. Add the fact that many modern blade enclosures integrate modular switches, and you can squeeze 120 hosts per rack, instead of just 38-40. The hardware cost difference is negligible, since you're buying one set of redundant power supplies to power all 10 blades. The enclosure itself is costly, but the blades aren't much pricier than a comparable server board.
If you're deploying lots of them like Blizzard, choosing blades means you only need 1/3rd of the floor space, 1/3rd the shipping cost, 1/3rd the installation labour, which represents a huge chunk of change when you're colocating at top-tier datacenters all around the world.
Blades may not make sense for everyone, but don't write them off just because your needs are satisfied by simpler solutions. Virtualization is a great tool that offers tremendous flexibility and reduced costs, but it is not a magic bullet to solve every problem. It excels at handling small jobs, and fails hard with large ones. For example, virtualization struggles with I/O heavy workloads, which are becoming increasingly important with the meteoric rise of data warehousing and distributed computing. Processors are the easiest part of the equation.
Re:Blades (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, and blade servers have better reliability, even if you think they have more points of failure. And, depending on your setup, space is a cost that is a consideration, and compactness will save money.
Re:Blizzard are scoundrels (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Hard drives? (Score:4, Informative)
Character data would be stored in a database (in Blizzard's case, Oracle). The local drives on the blades would have game data and server executables, which would be even more valuable than character data to the right people (gray-sharders, botters, and other nefarious types).