EVE Online: Growing Its Back Side

The latest EVE Online developer journal, penned by database administrator 'Valar', features some big news with regard to a major back end overhaul. Find out how big it's going to get below:

The new database servers

We brought in a couple of IBM xSeries 3850 M2's, with 128 GB RAM and two 2.6 GHz six core Xeons (Dunnington) to replace our aging IBM xSeries 3950, with two dual core 3.5 GHz Xeons and 64 GB RAM. This upgrade doubles the RAM of our database servers, but that helps with page cache lifetime and decreases IO and CPU load.

Our old database hardware was not nearing its capacity, however, due to our desire to decrease downtime and our goal to do maintenance and other previously downtime-regulated tasks while EVE-Online is online, we decided that increasing the capacity of our hardware was prudent.

The new database software

Since we are replacing the database hardware, why not replace the software as well. The new database servers run Windows 2008 Server Enterprise x64. The plan is to upgrade to SQL Server 2008 Enterprise x64 SP1 as well, but I will outline that better later in the blog.

Both the old and the new SQL servers run as a 2 node Windows cluster, with a SQL Server failover cluster in active/passive mode. There will be no change there.

There is a lot more to read for your technophiles so head to the link above.

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Wow! Now that is some cool stuff!
You said a 'couple' of 3850's. What exactly does that look like?