@Enough

As someone working in IT, I can't believe you'd make such a newbie mistake. IO parallelism is not the only factor involved in this sort of rollout, and you know it. You have to imagine that there's more to the process than 'image and go.' Wow's a complex system, the servers no doubt operate in clusters, the 'single database server' per battlegroup is almost guaranteed to be clustered. With the sheer number of points of failure that must be involved, not to mention the fact that there's not a 'standard' hardware configuration (newer realms have newer hardware) you can be damn sure there's most likely a tedious, thorough automated smoke test of every facet of connectivity and performance, not to mention multiple failures per rollout requiring engineering attention. This is completely ASIDE from the fact that they're generally not keen on bringing down servers for extended maintenance all that frequently and so more complex hardware upgrades, growing of RAID volumes and other longer-term tasks are PROBABLY on their schedule for these patch rollouts when they have more leeway (people don't expect the average tuesday downtime to run over, patch days it's a known fact of life.)

I mean, seriously. You're acting like this is a fire and forget operation.