A History of Eve Database Server Hardware

This used to be such a huge huge geekfest for me, but the world looks so different today. 64-cores (~$8000) & a TB of ram or two (~$5000/TB) and a SAN with 18 NVMe drives ($2000/pop for 8TB enterprise drives) is a huge huge huge leap in performance for EVE, a massive generational shift, is definitely not bad.

Previously it felt like eve ran on semi exotic hardware. Now though, this feels kind of regular, mortally achievable. NVMe has taken over. Massive cores are not that expensive.

They did have big amounts of data to store, it seems like. So alas this is too pricey for an all Optane buildout. They went with 64 rather than 128 cores, which I hate to call penny pinching but why not- maybe your sql server really couldnt use it but it seems like it can. But these tweaks would just be some more gravy, not a fundamentally more radica proposition.

Specifics aside, it's just two boxes (and then again for HA). The world feels like it's filled with big expensive databases and massive corporate compute clusters, humming along, somewhere far up in the cloud. We are used to seeing data center photos now, with aisles. Not sparsely populated racks... even if CCP did spend over $100k per pizza box (for the flashsystem 7200s).

I hate to say it, but there is a certain bit of AltaVista bragging about their hardware in 1996[1] to this. 'Our search is so complex it has 6 whole computers running it!' It's not that bad, this is really tight hardware (IBM charges north of $100k for FlashSystems 7200s), but it's weird seeing scale up as the name of the game, weird seeing a single box and tbinking- that is the EVE universe. Sorry I really want to encourage CCP continuing to share their tech, their ops, I hope this isnt too rude.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10407678

Those be some beefy machines. Nice.