I play WoW semi-regularly with two friends of mine and I have always seen the game as Blizzard’s giant cash cow. They can do whatever they want with their other games because WoW just generates so much moolah at around 17 CAD for a monthly subscription. Now that I’ve read about the hardware that keeps […]
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OT: Wow, look at how much hardware it takes to run WoW!

Sep 19th 2009 by

hardware behind wow

I play WoW semi-regularly with two friends of mine and I have always seen the game as Blizzard’s giant cash cow. They can do whatever they want with their other games because WoW just generates so much moolah at around 17 CAD for a monthly subscription. Now that I’ve read about the hardware that keeps the game aloft (gameloft, tee hee), my opinion hasn’t exactly changed – but I do have more respect for how much organization it takes to run a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) successfully. Here’s a pretty revealing couple of details from a recent Crunchgear article:

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.

Some of those numbers are so big I’ve literally never heard of them before! A petabyte sounds kinda yummy, though.

[via Crunchgear]

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