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Originally Posted by ShaolinFlame
I take it that the industry of server hosting is still rather decentralized and hodgepodge, so not a lot of companies have that volume of hardware available, let alone more business to run off them after? Why not go through 5, 10, 20, or 50?
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There could be, there are a number of very very large companies that have huge #'s of servers, but typically they're leased to other companies, who sublease those, etc etc. But there are some really huge ones, maybe even some that could handle that kind of temporary setup.
But like Rathji says it might also be a function of the hardware requirements and stuff, making that more difficult, especially across companies.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ShaolinFlame
I'm just thinking with the sheer volume of servers sitting in warehouses everywhere it should be possible. The unorganized state of the industries hardware side is the culprit. There must be a better way to efficiently act on this massive influx of information (although screaming 'buy more servers and single player1111!!!one' in allcaps on blizzards website is probably not it).
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Socialist server farms?
I have a guy I work with who's gone through the whole gambit with working with a massive # of servers, from having your own facility to having it in the cloud to leasing servers to virtualization... they've left virtualization and cloud behind as neither could deliver the performance they needed with the given resources, now he focuses more on being able to deal with easily rolling out more servers and/or dealing with failures. It's not an easy thing, and everyone's needs are different.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Top Shelf
I've been thinking about this, and wondering if they are using some sort of Cloud services to provision servers? If so, it would all be virtual anyways and they could easily spin up how ever many servers they needed to handle the load, assuming the hosting provider has sufficient capacity.
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Yeah the guy I know ran their stuff on Amazon for a while, and the performance and failure rates were just too much to make it viable for what they were doing (which was very different than what a lot of people do, but about as close as to what I can imagine Blizzard does as I can think of).