[MUD-Dev] TECH: Systems Administration Issues

[Thomas Leavitt]

I'm looking for information, from a systems administration
perspective, on operating an MMORPG's back end. I.e. how many
systems, what type of systems, how many users can generally be
handled per server, systems design - local or networked storage,
memory capacities, how services are distributed among various
systems, etc. System sizing info, basically.

I've got a decade's worth of systems administration experience in an
Internet environment, but this particular area is very far out of my
scope of experience, and yet I'm responsible for understanding it
well enough to provide prelimary feedback to our F&A guy to properly
shape our business plan and financial models, and providing
intelligent feedback to our development team on architectural design
proposals.

In other words, I need to have some plausible basis for saying, "for
every 10,000 users, we'll need X number of servers, costing Y $, and
needing Z number of systems people to maintain them". And for saying
to development, "Generally speaking, there are separate user and
object and event databases, login servers, message handling servers,
etc."

Reading through this, I'm getting the sense that this isn't as
simple as the standard trioka of "http, application, and database +
email/dns" servers that I'm familiar with from the Internet service
world.

Our CTO is really going to drive the technical design, but I'd like
to have some internal confidence that we're not blindly missing
something due to lack of experience operating a system of this sort.

So, I'd appreciate pointers to appropriate discussions, web sites,
documents, books, personal emails, etc. etc.

Thanks bunches,
Thomas Leavitt
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