Second Life Adds East Coast Servers

The NAP of the Capital Region in Culpeper, Virginia.

Linden Lab will expand the back-end for its Second Life virtual world to the East Coast, adding server infrastructure at the NAP of the Capital Region, a large data center operated by Terremark Worldwide in Culpeper, Virginia. The colocation agreement will help Second Life extend its 3D virtual world environment to support additional users.

Second Life was launched in 2003, and has become a large hub for user-generated content, with an “in-world” economy with more than $450 million in annual user-to-user transactions. The primary hosting facilities supporting the game are in San Francisco and Oakland. The future growth of Second Life was a factor in Linden’s choice of Terremark and the NAP of the Capital Region, a technology campus designed to eventually house five large data centers.

Second Life Scouts UK Data Centers

The operators of the Second Life virtual world are scouting locations for data center space in the United Kingdom, according to Massively, which tracks the MMO gaming sector. Linden Labs is said to be shopping for high-density space to house an expansion of its infrastructure for Second Life, which currently houses most of its servers in a pair of data centers in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Massively notes that a geographic expansion of Second Life might bring both benefits and challenges, given the virtual world’s architecture and historic scalability issues. ”It would be the first outside of the USA, and provide significantly faster access for EU residents to assets and simulators (aka regions) that were hosted at the facility,” the story notes. “By the same token, grid stability tends to be compromised when any pair of the Lab’s data-centers are unable to communicate with each-other, and an additional facility would seem to double the potential risk of such troubles.”

When In Rome

Hosting gaming infrastructure is becoming a big business. That was clear at the Game Developers Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, where Terremark Worldwide (TMRK) was on hand with a booth customized for the gaming crowd that showcased its NAP of the Americas in Miami. Photo by Cory Doctorow.

World of Warcraft Will Stay on AT&T Servers

Some customer renewals are more important than others. Hosting deals don’t get much bigger than AT&T’s contract to host the infrastructure for World of Warcraft, the world’s largest massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) with more than 11.5 million players worldwide. AT&T said Tuesday that game publisher Blizzard Entertainment has agreed to a two-year renewal to host World of Warcraft in North America.

AT&T has been working closely with Blizzard Entertainment for nine years, providing hosting for World of Warcraft and the Battle.net online-gaming service. “We’ve been pleased with AT&T’s service over the years, and we’re confident in their ability to continue to provide the quality support we need,” said Paul Sams, Chief Operating Officer of Blizzard Entertainment. “This renewed agreement allows us to stay completely focused on our games while AT&T applies its hosting expertise to help us offer the speed, reliability and security our players expect.”

GameRail Network Shuts Down

GameRail, the private gaming backbone providing low-latency connections to gamers, has announced that it is shutting down:

It is with deep regret to announce that the GameRail network has been discontinued at this time. … We believe that latency and network quality will continue to affect the gaming experience and while we are still believers in the GameRail concept, the market does not appear to be ready to support a standalone network for gaming at this time.

GameRail was a customer of Internap (INAP), which provided the gaming network with intelligent routing services to support its service. It also had connectivity agreements with XO Communications and Broadwing. The network was based in the Bandwidth Exchange buildings in St. Louis, which are now owned by Digital Realty Trust (DLR).

Stripped-Down, Streamlined Servers

Like most operators of online MMO games, CDC Games runs a lot of servers. Unlike World of Warcraft and other major MMORPGs, CDC doesn’t charge a fee for its games, and makes its money on the sale of in-game products and services. That model has worked well in the Chinese gaming market, and CDC has expanded into North America, hosting its equipment with Terremark (TMRK) at the company’s NAP of the Americas in Miami.

In a Network World profile, CDC general manager Ron Williams says server vendors would do well to consider the needs of gaming companies and other emerging providers focused on scalability, which have different priorities than the traditional enterprise customer. An excerpt:

“All of us are taking these generic, commoditized servers and trying to do the best we can, when what we really want is a stripped-down box that’s of high quality,” Williams says. “IBM can’t afford to keep all kinds of models around, but I think as we move more into cloud computing, someone is going to have to create (more stripped-down servers) for us, whether we’re gamers or software-as-a-service.”

Williams talks about the data center economics for gaming companies, and how they may differ from other customers. Check out the full story at Network World.

Peering Dispute Disrupts World of Warcraft

The Cogent-Telia peering dispute is causing major grief for gamers whose ISPs rely solely on Cogent for connectivity, who now find themselves unable to access World of Warcraft, the world’s most popular online game. It turns out that Blizzard Entertainment, which operates Warcraft, uses Telia for its Internet backbone services. Blizzard has advised Warcraft players of the business dispute between Cogent and Telia, which is also being discussed on Warcraft community news sites. It’s not clear whether this is affecting only Cogent networks in Europe, or the U.S. as well.

In de-peering Telia, Cogent is wagering that pressure from Telia’s users will bring the European broadband giant back to the table to work out their differences. But the Warcraft issue can’t be happy news for Cogent’s ISP customers, who are no doubt fielding complaints from angry gamers.

For more on network provider disputes and online gaming, check out RampRate’s column from 2006 titled “Every Time You Vote Against Net Neutrality, Your ISP Kills A Night Elf.”

Terremark Targets Gaming, Social Networking

Infrastructure service provider Terremark Worldwide (TMRK) has targeted the fast-growing online gaming market with the launch of the Terremark Interactive Entertainment Group, which provides managed infrastructure solutions for virtual worlds and social networking sites.

“We are seeing significant demand for our services from companies dedicated to bringing online gaming applications, virtual worlds, and social networking sites to market,” said Marvin Wheeler, President of Terremark’s U.S. Commercial Business Unit. “Our portfolio of premium managed services is ideally suited for large-scale performance-intensive applications such as massively multiplayer online games and this group is dedicated to creating solutions tailored precisely to the requirements of these innovative applications.”