Blizzard released some interesting information about the inner workings of World of Warcraft recently at GDC Austin. During their keynote speech, they talked about the history of the Warcraft games, and what exactly made their game so successful where others have failed. It’s an interesting read overall, however what we found amazing is the actual hardware required to run the game.
While it has seemed at times like it’s running on a old TRS-80, Blizzard is using some very cutting-edge equipment to keep us entertained. Apparently, in order for you to be able to log in whenever you want, it takes roughly 20,000 computer systems, over a petabyte of storage, and over 4600 people. Using multiple data centers around the world, this works out to a total of 13,250 server blades, 75,000 CPU cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM. They even monitor the weather in the areas where the data centers are, just to ensure that the servers don’t go down in the middle of that Naxx raid.
I think we’ve all wondered where our $14.95 a month has been going, and now we know: massive amounts of hardware so you can complain that the last patch “ruined” the game.