With the rapid approach of the EVE Online expansion, Aprocrypha, developers have produced a nice retrospective of the game and its future after Apocrypha. See what's been and will be happening in the EVE world below:

    With all of these fabulous new blogs about the fancy new things coming to EVE in the rapidly approaching Apocrypha expansion, I thought I would take some time to give you all an update from down here at the Tranquility command console of Virtual World Operations.

    As EVE moves towards its 7th year of operation, we are continuing to improve and expand the hardware of the servers running the game, ensuring that everyone gets the most lag free experience possible. The preparations we are making for Apocrypha are no different - we have been working quietly behind the scenes with quite a large number of significant improvements that allow us to keep growing our user count. Of course, with the retail launch of EVE just around the corner, we are making sure that when thousands more players come into EVE, everyone still gets the best performance ever!

    A Brand new RamSan!
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    First and foremost - we are making preparations to ensure that our database server will be able to keep up with this ever increasing number of users. As the true heart of Tranquility, any lag felt at the database level reflects across the entire universe, and it is highly important that we keep our database completely lag free.

    For the hardware geeks out there, the EVE database runs on a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Active/Standby cluster. It has two identical database servers, with the database stored over two RamSan 400s and a DS4800 fiber channel array.

    Our database servers themselves are more than capable of handling the levels of load we generate at present, with CPU usage quite acceptable, however we have noticed that our fiber channel disk array is starting to get pushed to a bit more load than we would like. This is not causing any visible issues just yet, but if left alone it will start to slow us down a bit - it's time to look to the future.

    So we bought a 2TB RamSan 500 :-)

    The new RamSan has been online for around a week now, running a few minor database tables while we ensure that everything is humming along smoothly (which it is) and making friends with our two existing RamSans. On Wednesday (18th Feb), we will be moving ALL data currently on our fiber channel drives over to this new RamSan, meaning the entire EVE database will be run from solid-state storage! Awesome!

    That's nice, but I don't know what that technobabble was all about, what does it mean for the average player?

    Having much faster storage means that we will see a number of improvements in the future:

        * Shorter daily downtimes
        * Shorter expansion deployments
        * Maintaining virtually nonexistent database lag

    And why do we need a whole 6 hours downtime to plug this thing in?

    It actually doesn't take very long at all to plug the new RamSan in - that was done offline a week or so back. The reason we need to take Tranquility and associated websites down is that we have to take the EVE database offline to move its files around.

    Moving the data files from our fiber channel disks to the RamSan