I’ve only been scanning the excellent liveblogging entries over on Virtual World News, but the closing entry contained something of particular interest. From that final entry covering the MIT Media Lab/IBM conference (Link), Linden Lab VP Joe Miller made the following comment:
We have no technical limitations of putting server farms elsewhere in the world to house the land. It’s easy for us to distribute those. Our challenge and what we’re dealing with now to get to Web scale is that the assets that make up Second Life from our residents take up 50 terabytes. We wouldn’t mirror that elsewhere and try to keep it current. We have an interesting next generation architecture that we’ll be talking about over the next 60 days and we’ll be expanding in orders or magnitude and concurrency.
I’m guessing we’ll be seeing some form of peer-to-peer system; maybe something like what Outback: Online might be using (reLink). We’ll know soon enough.
There’s actually quite a bit of information about the next generation architecture (or “Grid 2008” as it’s known) already out there. I posted some notes from one of Zero Linden’s office hours at http://www.technovia.co.uk/?p=1081 which gives a pretty reasonable outline of it. There’s no P2P involved (I’m really not sure that’s a viable solution for any programme where latency is an issue), but it’s a pretty smart system.
Much appreciated. I’ll have to give that a read.