Interesting post from WoW general forum.

[Lissa]

My point was of quality not cost. Blizzard makes plenty of money to cover extreme costs.

I assume Blizzard writes their own server code, if not that's pretty sad. It's better if they set up their own hardware so they can design their systems as one coherent whole.
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And you're still wrong. It has nothing to do about quality and everything to do about cost. Do you know what a Network Administrator gets paid that knows what they're doing? Network Admins that do this kind of high end work typically are Cisco CCNEs, the highest and most difficult certification to get in IT (it usually requires about 5 to 10 years of working with Cisco gear constantly to have even a shot at passing this test on the second try, yes, SECOND try, it has a 85% failure rate for first time takers and these are people that have spent years working with Cisco gear). As such, these people are typically payed on the order of 85k+ minimum a year (more typical salaries are around 120k a year). Now, do you think Blizzard has the ability to pay a team of 5 to 6 people (cause you gotta have atleast 1 on staff at all times) a combined total of 500k to 600k a year? And we're not even talking about the other operating costs that go into a datacenter of this magnitude that Blizzard requires with the number of servers it has. Simply put, this has absolutely nothing to do with quality and everything to do with cost.