Meanwhile, Sony also took its online role-playing games offline, and later confirmed that hackers had also penetrated security systems at the Sony Online Entertainment service.

The PSN servers had been housed in an AT&T data center in San Diego, California. The Playstation Network is operated by a Sony  Network  Entertainment International, a business unit created last year to manage dedicated infrastructure for PSN. Sony hosts most of its gaming infrastructure  with AT&T’s game hosting division, which operates out of multiple data centers around the globe.

Sony said that it had “expedited an already planned move of the system to a new data center in a different location that has been under construction and development for several months,” according to an update on the Playstation blog. “Following a criminal cyber-attack on the company’s data-center located in San Diego, California, U.S.A., SNEI quickly turned off the PlayStation Network and Qriocity services, engaged multiple expert information security firms over the course of several days and conducted an extensive audit of the system. Since then, the company has implemented a variety of new security measures to provide greater protection of personal information.”

Sony did not indicate the location of the new data center or provide details on how it might differ from the facility in San Diego that had previously housed PSN. The data center move was part of a broader initiative to improve the security of the network.

UPDATE: On Monday Sony also took the Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) service offline, and later said that its security had also been breached, resulting in the theft of personal information from 24.6 million SOE accounts may have been stolen, along with 12,700 non-U.S. credit or debit card numbers. The SOE network provides online gaming for PC users playing Sony massively multiplayer games such as Everquest and Star Wars Galaxies, while the SNEI network supports gamers using the PlayStation gaming system.

A look at the cold aisle containment system housing the new server cluster for the sci-fi onlune universe EVE Online.

The online science fiction game universe EVE Online is moving into new space in its existing data center in London, where game operator CCP Games has deployed a 12-cabinet cluster of servers. The new deployment will house the Tranquility (TQ) cluster, which powers the EVE Universe of more than 330,000 players (except for Chinese users, who play on the separate Serenity cluster).

“It’s gotten to the point were a couple of cabinets simply don’t handle it anymore,” writes Derek Wise, CCP’s Technical Director, in a blog post describing the new infrastructure. “This will provide better network connectivity, fewer intermediary devices and increased capacity.”

The new cluster runs IBM blade servers with 280 total cores, and more than 4.8 terabytes of local storage. The Tranquility cabinets require 79 kilowatts of power and are housed in a cold-aisle containment system to manage airflow and server waste heat. “Cold air from the center of the aisle is force-fed into the cabinets reducing the loss or wasted cool air significantly and helping to focus cold air where it’s needed most,” Wise writes. “This takes the industry standard “hot aisle/cold aisle” designs a step further without having to do anything crazy like running servers under nitrogen pools (although that is pretty cool).”

The EVE universe will migrate to the new cluster on June 23. See Wise’s post on the EVE Insider Dev Blog for more.

A screenshot from the long-awaited StarCraft II from Blizzard Entertainment, which will debut on July 27.

Blizzard Entertainment said Tuesday that it will continue to use AT&T’s data centers and network to deliver its World of Warcraft to 11 million gamers. Significantly, AT&T said its expanded agreement with Blizzard will include “current and upcoming games in the company’s popular StarCraft and Diablo universes.”

That means that AT&T will provide the back end for Blizzard’s highly-anticipated StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty virtual world, which launches July 27th. The new game is the sequel to Blizzard’s 1998 hit StarCraft, one of the top real-time strategy games of all time. That might also explain why AT&T and Blizzard announced a new contract less than a year after the companies touted a two-year agreement to power Warcraft’s infrastructure.

Hosting, CDN and Monitoring
The new multimillion dollar multi-year deal expands the 10-year relationship between Blizzard and AT&T, which provides hosting services for Blizzard in North America, as well as content delivery network (CDN services and voice and data for Global Call Center Support.  AT&T will provide around-the-clock monitoring and management of the technology infrastructure that supports Blizzard’s online games.

AT&T supports Blizzard with its Gaming Core Team, a specialized unit formed in 2004 to meet the infrastructure needs of customers’ gaming operations.

“Over the years, AT&T has demonstrated that it understands the needs of our business,” said Paul Sams, Chief Operating Officer of Blizzard Entertainment. “The services and support AT&T provides have helped us to consistently deliver high-quality online-gaming experiences to our players.”

AT&T doesn’t provide a lot of details on Blizzard’s infrastructure. But last fall Blizzard’s Allen Brack and Frank Pearce provided some details at the Game Developer’s Conference in Austin. Here are some data points:

• Blizzard Online Network Services run in 10 data centers around the world, including facilities in Washington, California, Texas, Massachusetts, France, Germany, Sweden, South Korea, China, and Taiwan.
• Blizzard uses 20,000 systems and 1.3 petabytes of storage to power its gaming operations.
• WoW’s infrastructure includes 13,250 server blades, 75,000 CPU cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM.
• The Blizzard network is managed by a staff of 68 people.
• The company’s gaming infrastructure is monitored from a global network operating center (GNOC), which like many NOCs, features televisions tuned to the weather stations to track potential uptime threats across its data center footprint.

AT&T’s 36 Internet Data Centers offer more than 2 million square feet of secure hosting facilities around the globe.

So what happens when all these virtual assets are put in play and the servers can’t handle the load? A post at Slashdot provides a cautionary tale about the importance of sturdy infrastructure to support virtual economies. Players in the science fiction MMOG EVE Online claim that thousands of dollars worth of in-game assets were destroyed when server lag created an uneven playing field in a huge online battle between warring fleets of starships. Game operator CCP Games recently launched an expansion pack, and some gamers say the new code has experienced performance problems (CCP is running stress tests today to investigate the claims). Scandal or sour grapes? As one player noted on one of the EVE forums, “You don’t hear the winning side whining about lag very often.”

Interestingly, the debate about EVE Online emerges the same day that another space-themed MMO, Planet Calypso, announced that a player had paid $330,000 to buy a virtual space station.

It takes a lot of resources to host the world’s largest online games. One of the largest players in this niche is Blizzard, which operates World of Warcraft and the Battle.net gaming service for its Starcraft and Diablo titles. World of Warcraft (WoW) is played by more than 11.5 million users across three continents, requiring both scale and geographic scope.

Blizzard hosts its gaming infrastructure with AT&T, which provides data center space, network monitoring and management. AT&T, which has been supporting Blizzard for nine years, doesn’t provide a lot of details on Blizzard’s infrastructure. But Blizzard’s Allen Brack and Frank Pearce provided some details at the recent Game Developer’s Conference in Austin. Here are some data points:

• Blizzard Online Network Services run in 10 data centers around the world, including facilities in Washington, California, Texas, Massachusetts, France, Germany, Sweden, South Korea, China, and Taiwan.
• Blizzard uses 20,000 systems and 1.3 petabytes of storage to power its gaming operations.
• WoW’s infrastructure includes 13,250 server blades, 75,000 CPU cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM.
• The Blizzard network is managed by a staff of 68 people.
• The company’s gaming infrastructure is monitored from a global network operating center (GNOC), which like many NOCs, features televisions tuned to the weather stations to track potential uptime threats across its data center footprint.

The AT&T Gaming Core Team was formed in 2004 to host gaming operations using AT&T’s IP network. The team consists of engineers and hosting specialists who provide round-the-clock support to companies offering MMO games.

For more on the specialized niche for game hosting, see Virtual Goods and the Cost of Infrastructure, Second Life and the Scalability of Online Games and Engineering Everquest.

For additional information on Blizzard’s recent discussions of its infrastructure, see Gamespot, Gamasutra and ComputerWorld.

RELATED STORIES:

• World of Warcraft Will Stay on AT&T’s Servers
• Peering Dispute Disrupts World of Warcraft
• Data Center Move Stalls Wiorld of Warcraft
• Virtual Goods and the Cost of Infrastructure
• The Scalability of Online Games

It takes a lot of resources to host the world’s largest online games. One of the largest players in this niche is Blizzard, which operates World of Warcraft and the Battle.net gaming service for its Starcraft and Diablo titles. World of Warcraft (WoW) is played by more than 11.5 million users across three continents, requiring both scale and geographic scope.

Blizzard hosts its gaming infrastructure with AT&T, which provides data center space, network monitoring and management. AT&T, which has been supporting Blizzard for nine years, doesn’t provide a lot of details on Blizzard’s infrastructure. But Blizzard’s Allen Brack and Frank Pearce provided some details at the recent Game Developer’s Conference in Austin. Here are some data points:

• Blizzard Online Network Services run in 10 data centers around the world, including facilities in Washington, California, Texas, Massachusetts, France, Germany, Sweden, South Korea, China, and Taiwan.
• Blizzard uses 20,000 systems and 1.3 petabytes of storage to power its gaming operations.
• WoW’s infrastructure includes 13,250 server blades, 75,000 CPU cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM.
• The Blizzard network is managed by a staff of 68 people.
• The company’s gaming infrastructure is monitored from a global network operating center (GNOC), which like many NOCs, features televisions tuned to the weather stations to track potential uptime threats across its data center footprint.

The AT&T Gaming Core Team was formed in 2004 to host gaming operations using AT&T’s IP network. The team consists of engineers and hosting specialists who provide round-the-clock support to companies offering MMO games.

For more on the specialized niche for game hosting, see Virtual Goods and the Cost of Infrastructure, Second Life and the Scalability of Online Games and Engineering Everquest.

For additional information on Blizzard’s recent discussions of its infrastructure, see Gamespot, Gamasutra and ComputerWorld.

RELATED STORIES:

• World of Warcraft Will Stay on AT&T’s Servers
• Peering Dispute Disrupts World of Warcraft
• Data Center Move Stalls Wiorld of Warcraft
• Virtual Goods and the Cost of Infrastructure
• The Scalability of Online Games

Some of the customer racks supporting online gaming operations inside a GNi data center.

In an economy built atop virtual goods, how do you manage capacity and sort out whether the business model is able to pay for the infrastructure required to power it? That’s an important questionas as virtual item purchases become a key revenue stream for fast-growing social networking platforms like Facebook.

Managed hosting specialist GNi, which offers an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) hosting platform for online games, offers a window into the evolving infrastructure requirements of virtual economies. In the U.S., popular understanding of online gaming has been shaped by the popularity of World of Warcraft and other virtual worlds that generate through monthly subscription fees. That approach is increasingly yielding to a “free-to-play” business model.

“A lot of games are free, and now make their money by selling virtual items,” said Robert Yusin, General Manager of Field Operations at GNi. “The most popular games that we see are the virtual item games.”

Pioneered in Asia
This gaming business models based on virtual goods developed in Asia, where some industry watchers say virtual goods is a $7 billion market. One of GNI’s large gaming customers is Frogster Interactive, whose free-to-play game Runes of Magic has more than 2 million users.

“We had to figure out a capacity planning strategy,” said Yusin. “How do they monetize that huge user base and create a profitable model?”

The infrastructure piece of the equation is a crucial variable, since the creation of new virtual items is relatively inexpensive.”The incremental cost of another gif is zero,” as Live Gamer chief technology officer William Grosso said in a presentation at the Virtual Goods Summit last week.

Content Delivery a Key Cost
The delivery of that content is another matter. “Flexibility and the ability to virtually expand and contract is critical for gaming,” said Yusin. “They have peaks and valleys (in their usage), especially when they add new capabilities.”

“Next-generation gaming places greater demands on infrastructure, requiring persistent session continuity, the ability to scale flexibly and dynamically to serve changing audiences, and high reliability, all of which must be delivered within tight cost parameters,” said Lydia Leong at Gartner.

A subscription model makes for easier math on the revenue side (x subscribers vs x subscription fee per month) and understanding how the infrastructure spend will affect profitability. Uptime becomes even more important in a transaction-based economy, in which revenue comes to a halt when players are offline.

Peaks and Valleys
“Frogster is really about how many items they are able to sell,” Yusin explained. “They build precision models based on X number of users, and are able to really track peaks and valleys around new features and special promotions.”

In September Frogster introduced a new feature, and the game’s bandwidth usage surged to a sustained 600 megabits of data per second, and stayed at that level for four days. That creates challenges for the game hosting provider, especially one like GNi that also has a growing business hosting applications for enterprise clients, including financial institutions.

“(Enterprise) requirements are around uptime, security, disaster recovery and application management,” Yusin said. “Those are not the concerns we hear from gaming customers. With the gamers, it’s how fast can I get this? How fast can we expand?”

Segmenting Data Center Operations
The divergent requirements of game companies and enterprise customers are factored into GNi’s data center planning. “We have to be able to create segmentation within our infrastructure,” Yusin explained. “If a game is launching, we will isolate its infrastructure from the rest of our customers, so it doesn’t impact our SLAs (security-level agreements). We also have flexibility in adjusting the burstability of our network.”

GNi’s IaaS gaming platform offers tools for developers and for gamers has been growing quickly, Yusin said, driven by interest from developers in Europe. The company operates data centers in California, Frankfurt and Singapore, and is seeking an additional data center presence on the east coast of U.S. GNi has a standard gaming “pod” of IBM blade servers that can be turned up quickly, but also offers colocation services to accommodate custom devices like security appliances for its enterprise customers.

“In effect, gamers in the PC community will not be able to run Modern Warfare 2 on dedicated servers that they may rent, as they are able to with previous Call of Duty games,” writes GamaSutra. “In addition, no dedicated servers likely means that IWNet will not support mods and custom maps for the game, at least at launch.”

The decision has generated a huge backlash among PC gamers, especially competitive gamers and clans who have trained and competed on private dedicated servers. More than 90,000 people have signed an online petition urging Infinity Ward to change its policy and release a version of Modern Warfare 2 for dedicated servers.

The policy change would appear to have implications for providers who have sold large numbers of COD servers. Planet Call of Duty has a comprehensive roundup of coverage and reaction from around the web.

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.

“As Second Life continues to expand its infrastructure to meet current and future demands in user traffic and content generation, we felt Terremark’s full suite of world-class IT solutions provided a high level of flexibility for those future business and technology needs,” said Frank Ambrose, Senior Vice President of Global Technology for Linden Lab. “The NAP of the Capital Region’s sophisticated design affords us the opportunity to expand in multiple facilities within the same campus while partnering with a company that shares our commitment to limiting the environmental impact of our activities by employing energy-efficient systems.”

The NAP of the Capital Region has industrial-strength infrastructure, supported by two 30-megawatt power feeds from Rappahannock Electric Cooperative, anda third 30-megawatt feed from Dominion Virginia Power. Each of the five planned 50,000 square foot data centers at the site will be supported by 11 Caterpillar 2.25 megawatt generators, for a total of 55 generators once the campus is completed. To support those generators, the NAP of the Capital Region can store up to 520,000 gallons of diesel fuel on site.

For additional details, see our video tour of the first facility at the Culpeper campus.

“The fact that Linden Lab has selected to colocate their critical infrastructure in Terremark’s data center outside Washington, D.C. is a powerful testament to our impressive combination of leading-edge solutions and world-class datacenters,” said Barry Field, Terremark’s Senior Vice President for U.S. Commercial Sales. “From colocation and disaster recovery to cloud computing and secure information services, the availability of our complete set of offerings from a global datacenter footprint presents compelling value to public and private-sector organizations searching for solutions to meet their full-range of IT needs.”

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.”