MMO Infrastructure for WOW

Data Center Knowledge has a story http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/11/25/wows-back-end-10-... about the current World of Warcraft infrastructure

That is just awesome. The bottom of that story has additional links to information about Second Life and Everquest that are interesting too if you are into that.

If you have no idea what this is let me describe some things.

In the Massively multiplayer worlds you rarely have a single instance of a world with all of your users in it. So in this case what you will have is hundreds of world instances in clusters and you and your friends join a given instance to play together.

Imagine the game world like like this:

main game &
login servers ---> instance1 -------> server1/server2/db1/db2
                    |
                    |> instance2 -------> server1/server2/db1/db2
                    |
                    |> instanceN -------> server1/server2/db1/db2

And so on. Plus of course dozens and dozens of other servers for all of the non-world infrastructure.

At say 30 watts per CPU core assuming multicore processors and say at .10 kWh they are spending about $2 million on power alone. I am glad the players are sitting alone in dark basements, maybe it equals out on the energy production side :)