‘It seemed like a crazy idea’: A tech expert got the inside story on how Blizzard saved a lot of money by selling 10,000 old WoW servers to fans in a charity auction β and one even ended up as a wedding gift
While flying to SC23 (the 2023 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis) in Denver, Patrick Kennedy emerged Serve it house had a chance encounter with a man on the plane who told an intriguing story about Blizzard’s decision to auction off its servers to fans.
World of Warcraft launched in November 2004 and was hugely popular – even now boasting over a million daily logins. Each player’s character is tied to a specific realm, requiring servers to continuously monitor the status of all players and NPCs.
In 2005, Blizzard implemented AMD Opteron 275 processors in HP ProLiant BL25p blades, providing significant performance improvements. These servers, essential for storing each player’s status, were constantly experiencing database writes.
A wedding gift
After six to seven years, the TCO payback time for replacing more than 10,000 blades was approximately 13 months. However, removing old blades was a major problem. Recycling companies often take ownership of decommissioned infrastructure and sell servers to generate revenue. Blizzard’s HP server blades were so outdated that instead of paying recycling teams to take them, Blizzard may have had to pay up to a million dollars for their disposal.
In an effort to avoid these costs, the company decided to sell the hardware to WoW fans. Kennedy says: βInstead of selling the servers directly, the blades were sourced from global data centers. A company then produced the placards with the agency name and a message. These were then auctioned off at a charity auction for St. Jude.β
This charity auction provided Blizzard with a tax benefit and covered the project costs of removing the old blades.
It’s a fascinating story, and well worth reading. While it’s impossible to know where all the knives ended up, we do know what happened to one.
In a comment below Serve the House In the story, reader Tod Weitzel says: βIn 2011, I had just received the save the date card (and the invitation to be a groomsmen) at the wedding of two best friends who had met on World of Warcraft. Then I heard about the auction. After a lot of nerve-wracking eBay renewals, I won one of the two listed for our home server, Cenarion Circle. It cost more than I would have liked, but less than the limits of my goodwill toward the newlyweds. When the knife arrived in the mail, I was thrilled to see the plexiglass lid with the WoW logo that replaced the steel lid. It was attached with built-in magnets, so I took it off. Then, over the next six months, I sent it in a chain across the country, among all the members of our guild, who signed 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 present surrounding it.