cost question

[edscdk]

could you give me some detail on the hardware you would recomend

what do you mean by hardware? do you include all the backend database stuff and hubs / switchs/ air con?

2 mil users I would guess 2000 users per dual quad server, 32gb ram (total guess I dont have a clue, but i cannot imagine is much work for the server)

if you have 1 game world
1000 front end servers
10 login servers
a monster database server cluster
a data center or a fair chunk of one
a big stash of cash for a massive internet pipe
lots of expensive comms equipment
several dedicated hardware support staff
a team of devs
a large marketing budget
a lot of air con (but if you rent space it will be included)
a lot of cash for you electric bill
UPS's, a backup generator

I'd guess you would need some super fast back bone and mid teir servers to integrate all the single servers into the 'world' say another 50 dedicated servers

I dont have a clue, I would be interested if anyone actually KNEW what sort of setup is used?

 

[Yamahahahahaha]

Iirc Final Fantasy XI uses an integrated scalable cluster system. It's basically a half-height chassis (~21U) which just takes more blades as-and-when.
The overheads for processing and storage weren't as enormous as you would imagine, but I think this is one of the benefits of having a sharded system.

Running sharded, instanced games are best from a load-balancing and scalability viewpoint. With a large backplane you can easily bump instances to other nodes when things get busy.

I'm quite ignorant of the HPC sector, but I'm sure at least one member has experience in it.