Patrick Kennedy of Serve The Home was on a flight to SC23 (International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analytics 2023) in Denver when he happened to meet a man on the plane who told him an interesting story about Blizzard's decision to auction off its 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 Blizzard's HP server blades were so outdated that instead of the recycling team paying for their removal, Blizzard could have paid up to $1 million to remove the blades.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 a comment on the Serve the Home article, reader Tod 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, and after a lot of nerve-wracking searches on eBay, I won one of two listed for my home server, Cenarion Circle. It was more than I was hoping for, but less than I could afford to be nice to 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 cap; it was attached with a magnet, so I removed it. Over the next six months, I sent it across the country on a chain to every member of my guild and had them sign it in silver ink. I have a photo of the happy couple seeing it for the first time at their wedding, and all the guild members in attendance surrounding it.”
