MMO Design research

Bealdwine

I'm playing with the idea of basing my final year Comp Science Dissertation/Project on some aspect of MMORPG design (Hardware systems or software).

Anyway I've done some quick n dirty searches on the Web and come up pretty empty.

Does anyone know where I could get some info on hardware requirements (from the server end not the client/user) or specifics of software design to implement the capacity that must be necessary for the numbers of concurrent clients accessing the system?

There's a lot of "what an MMORPG should be" stuff out there, but what I need to find are specific examples of how the 'behind-the-scenes' realities are being dealt with for some of the current active MMO games.