ceritus - Slashdot User

An Inside Look At Warhammer Online's Server Setup 71

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday December 31, 2009 @02:30AM from the hate-to-see-the-power-bill dept.

An article at Gamasutra provides some details on the hardware Mythic uses to power Warhammer Online, courtesy of Chief Technical Officer Matt Shaw and Online Technical Director Andrew Mann. Quoting: "At any given time, approximately 2,000 servers are in operation, supporting the gameplay in WAR. Matt Shaw commented, 'What we call a server to the user, that main server is actually a cluster of a number of machines. Our Server Farm in Virginia, for example,' Mann said, 'has about 60 Dell Blade chassis running Warhammer Online — each hosting up to 16 servers. All in all, we have about 700 servers in operation at this location.' ... 'We use blade architecture heavily for Warhammer Online,' Mann noted. 'Almost every server that we deploy is a blade system. We don't use virtualization; our software is somewhat virtualized itself. We've always had the technology to run our game world across several pieces of hardware. It's application-layer clustering at a process level. Virtualization wouldn't gain us much because we already run very close to peak CPU usage on these systems.' ... The normalized server configuration — in use across all of the Mythic-managed facilities — features dual Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors running at 3 GHz with 8 GB of RAM."

Comment Re:DUH! (Score 1) 367

by ceritus on Wednesday October 11, 2006 @03:00PM (#16397591) Attached to: Deprecating the Datacenter?

... print server and file server local, it was now 1/2 way across the country .... Large Datacenters have always been a stupid idea. distributing your services to locations around your offices is far more efficient and significantly lowers the connectivity needs

That's a very narrow view on this issue. Office type servers are only a small part of what goes into datacenters as a whole. The one's I'm familiar with are mostly filled with web sites/services that demand the tight controls and close-to-the-backbone connections that datacenters can only give. Datacenters are also used for huge data warehouses, massive computing, etc.

Your post does illuminate one point, although somewhat obliquely: datacenters allow a small number of people to take care of a ton of critical systems. The more spread out something is physically, the more overhead and pain is going to be involved in taking care of it.

Slashdot Top Deals