Outlining the “new” infrastructure

Since I am moving the server out of the colocation facility and back into my home (thanks to a business-grade FIOS line), there are some side benefits I can take advantage of — all of which revolve around the fact that the amount of infrastructure added to the game is only limited by the amount of power I can feed from my circuit breaker, and how many servers I can fit in my basement without generating enough heat to turn off my gas service. (Then again, considering it’s about 7 degrees in New York right now, that may not be a bad idea!)

In short, the following are all possibilities now that we have greater flexibility.

• Offloading data to external USB drives. Obviously this would not be live game data; it would be the backups of that data. This will help the server disk subsystem a lot by reducing fragmentation and load during backup times. This is a no-brainer; I have a 300GB USB drive sitting under my desk waiting.
• Firing up the old CSFBL server to handle the web services. Those that remember CSFBL 2 1/2 years ago would have remembered our old server. It’s actually not a bad server (dual processor, 2GB RAM); it’s just big (coffee-table tower). It’s definitely less powerful than the current server, so we will do the logical thing: put the web site on the less powerful (old) server, and put the database and sim engine on the more powerful (current) server. This could have a significant performance improvement, especially considering the load that the forums puts on the current server (to the tune of 500+ MB of RAM). The only delay in doing this will be if I need to get more electrical juice in my basement storage room to handle two servers demanding some 400 watts of power each.
• Getting another server from babarfloyd. Rick (babarfloyd) has often offered to provide a server he has in his house to help the game, and with the recent turn of events, has even offered to ship it to me. This could, in theory, mean three servers, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. I’d definitely need to consider both power and cooling demands if I throw three servers in my basement (not counting an electric bill that would start to grow quite quickly), and there are programming and logistic issues to address before we can scale out this far, but it’s good to have this as an option.

Of course, all this could be thrown out the window if the FIOS Internet connection proves unreliable or lacking the throughput we truly need. If this is the case, the clear choice is to eventually move to managed server hosting. I’ve spoken to people at SoftLayer, who have an excellent reputation (I did a lot of research) and who were also very quick to answer all my inquiries. They provide managed dedicated servers — basically, they make sure it runs 24/7, you worry about what runs on it. The downside is the cost — $300+ per month per server — but this is the highest-quality hosting we can get, and is reasonable considering the massive data and processing needs of CSFBL.

We can’t predict where we’ll be in a year, but the possibilities outlined above are all things that may become reality over the coming weeks and/or months.