An impregnable stronghold. The place where the treasures of the modern information world are kept.
Thousands of these complexes are deployed on all the continents.
They are nodes of the global network.
Their location is known to very few people,
but every one of us has access to the information stored within them.
Massively multiplayer online games are currently developing at an unprecedented rate.
Wargaming projects have fans all around the globe and their number is ever growing.
We have 100 million registered active users that are playing at least once a week.
We have maybe 80 or 100 thousands playing on one certain cluster.
If several clusters belong to a region,
we have up to one million players that are playing at the same time in that region.
These numbers give you an idea of the scale and quality of equipment necessary to handle
the enormous amount of game data including that from the Wargaming projects.
For example, if you created a fascinating multiplayer game and installed a server in your apartment,
as the number of players grows, you will have to increase its capacity,
improve its architecture and connection channels.
And to make it all operate flawlessly you will need an uninterrupted power supply,
a cooling system, and reliable security.
Sooner or later, you’ll come up with the idea of a data center—
a specialized building to install all the necessary server equipment.
One of the best European data centers is located in Luxembourg,
the capital of a small European country.
A huge army of Wargaming's European players is connected to the servers installed there.
Welcome to the data center.
We exist to provide cooling and power to our clients,
so that they can continuously provide services to their clients.
The Luxembourg data center is located at a considerable depth of 22 meters—
equal to a seven-story building.
Its total area is 15,000 square meters.
The building is kept out of the public eye and has strict security.
It ensures continuous round-the-clock work for hundreds of servers
and consumes enough electric power for a small city.
The power is provided from two totally separated sides of the country
and that gives us the whole data center a side A and a side B.
All the electrical and cooling services provided on side A
are mirrored on side B and they are completely independent.
And this is side B, which, as you can see,
is a direct mirror image of side A.
So if you lost one power supply,
one cooling system,
then the other side would simply power up harder, make more energy,
provide more energy automatically. …
We achieved that by having everything completely duplicated.
In case the data center completely loses the external power supply,
the complex has an emergency system.
It consists of uninterruptible power supply devices and generators.
Batteries only need to keep the data center powered for 16 seconds,
until the generators kick in, and they can work as long as there is enough fuel.
This is the diesel tank room. We have two 50,000-liter tanks of diesel,
which will run the data center for five and a half days at full load.
We also have contracts in Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany, and France
to have fuel delivered to the data center in under four hours.
We are third in the queue, after the military, hospitals, and then the data center.
Several floors of servers working round-the-clock produce a very large amount of heat.
For example, it would be enough to provide heating to a student campus.
To keep the equipment from overheating, you need a good cooling system.
And basic air conditioning won't be enough here.
A temperature of around 24, 25, 26 degrees depending on what the client wants in that room.
Different equipment requires different temperatures, and we can control it all from here.
We do that using chilled water and pumps, all computer controlled,
which then push chilled water round through into the cooling units in each room
to take the heat away from the data center.
Sometimes you might go past buildings and see plumes of steam—
that’s the vapor coming off the cooling towers, taking the energy away into the atmosphere.
However, all this cutting-edge technology and equipment will just be a huge waste of money
if the data center doesn't have a reliable connection to the outside world.
Without a constant high-speed internet connection the very idea of online multiplayer is impossible.
We cannot put the servers to Australia, when you are playing in Europe.
This is the reason why the servers are in Europe.
And we cannot choose an Internet provider that is sending packets between London and Paris via New York.
So we must choose one that is very good connected,
that is the reason why we are selecting the biggest ISPs in the world
that are best connected to avoid such problems.
There aren’t many data centers similar to the facility in Luxembourg.
It has been assigned the Tier 4 category,
which means that its maximum unavailability time is 26 minutes and 30 seconds a year,
but even this has never happened.
The data center in Luxembourg, where we are now, was unavailable for only 13 seconds
during its whole operation period. And that's not bad at all.
Every time a player clicks the Battle! button, a colossal machine starts working
and creating a unique in-game reality.
Every minute, people from different countries
connect to servers, rented by Wargaming, to face other players in battle and win,
to have fun playing and communicating.
This is the reason why Wargaming deploys its servers in the most reliable data centers,
outfitted with state-of-the-art equipment.
24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year.
This plant never stops.
It runs forever.
And that’s our job.