On the plane to SC23 (2023 International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analytics) in Denver, Serving the Family On the plane, I happened to meet a guy who told me an interesting story about Blizzard’s decision to auction off their servers to fans.
World of Warcraft was released in November 2004 and became hugely popular, still boasting over one million logins per day. Each player’s character is tied to a specific realm, requiring a server to continually track the state of all players and NPCs.
In 2005, Blizzard introduced AMD Opteron 275 processors in HP ProLiant BL25p blades, significantly improving performance. These servers, which were essential for saving each player’s state, faced constant writes to the database.
Wedding gifts
After six to seven years, the TCO payback period for replacing more than 10,000 blades was about 13 months. But removing the old blades was a non-trivial problem. Recyclers often own decommissioned infrastructure and make money by selling the servers. Blizzard’s HP server blades were so outdated that instead of the recycling team paying for their removal, Blizzard could have paid up to $1 million to remove the blades.
To avoid these costs, the company decided to sell its hardware to WoW fans. Kennedy says, “Instead of selling the servers directly, blades were pulled from data centers around the world. A company then produced placards with the instance name and a message. These were then auctioned off in a charity auction to St. Jude.”
The charity auction provided Blizzard with tax benefits to help cover the costs of the project to remove the old blades.
It’s a very interesting story and well worth the read. It’s impossible to know where all the blades went, but we do know what happened to one blade.
In the comments Serving the Family Commenting on this article, reader Todd Weitzel said, “In 2011, I had just received a Save the Date card (and groomsman invitations) from the wedding of two of my best friends, whom I’d met through World of Warcraft. Then I heard about the auction. After a lot of nerve-wracking searches on eBay, I won one of two listed on our home server, Cenarion Circle. It was a bit more than I’d hoped for, but I thought it was within my means to please the newlywed couple. When the blade arrived in the mail, I was happy to see that it had a plexiglass cover with the WoW logo on it instead of the steel lid. It was attached with a magnet, so it was easy to remove. Over the next six months, I sent it around the country on a chain to every member of my guild to sign in silver ink. I have a photo of the happy couple seeing the card for the first time at their wedding, with all the guild members in attendance surrounding it.”
