Case Study

Maintaining A Quality On-line Gaming Experience

Maintaining A Quality On-line Gaming Experience

Highlights

The Challenge
  • Required packet broker capabilities in new data center.
  • Needed to replace expensive, outdated packet brokers.
The Solution
  • nGenius® 5000 series packet flow switch.
  • NETSCOUT® service assurance solutions.
The Results
  • Optimize both capital and operating expenses

Customer Profile

This North America-based online gaming company has developed and published some of world’s most widely used and recognized multi-player, on-line, computer games. They have thousands of employees operating in several offices, globally supporting every aspect of the gaming experience, from development, to the customer-facing network, to live arena events. With more than 20 years of experience, the company has earned an unparalleled reputation for its innovative, creative, and immersive gaming experiences.

The Challenge

A new international facility was opening in Asia and, as had been the case with all their locations, the IT organization anticipated the need for visibility into the traffic throughout the network of this facility. Achieving as high a quality user experience as possible for its gamers has driven this company to bring services closer to their customer population and then ensure their experience is flawless by monitoring the performance of services in each facility to stay ahead of emerging issues – be they performance or security related.

Such was the case as they planned for their new Asia facility. The packet broker technology that had been deployed in other offices had become prohibitively expensive. Not only was the capital cost for these hardware-based units much more costly than comparable software models, even the maintenance costs on the legacy units were becoming exorbitant. Given the legacy status of the units as well, it simply made sense that the IT staff investigated other alternatives for packet flow switching. As one of the directors in the CIO’s office was familiar with NETSCOUT’s service assurance solutions that were currently in use in their primary data center locations, they included NETSCOUT in the early research for the packet broker.

Solution in Action

Following a thorough evaluation of existing and new packet broker options, the director of network architecture and operations selected the nGenius 5000 series packet flow switch. There were several reasons that the nGenius 5000 PFS stood out. Top on the list was that NETSCOUT offered it as a software version, which provided a far more cost-effective option than competitive alternatives. Ongoing maintenance costs were also lower as a result. Operating at speeds up to 100 Gbps, the nGenius 5100 PFS scales to the needs of the world’s largest enterprise, government, and service provider networks. As the traffic grew in this new data center, the company’s network architects were confident that it would meet their expanding needs.

Providing the aggregation, replication, filtering, load balancing and source port tagging that were necessary to support both service assurance and security initiatives at the gaming company, the nGenius 5100 Packet Flow Switch has become the standard option for subsequent deployments and upgrades, including the most recent deployment in a primary US data center.

The Results

The company is gaining several postimplementation benefits with the nGenius 5100 packet flow switch. The most obvious benefit is a modern, software-based, feature-rich, packet flow switch that is both cost-effective to purchase and maintain. This is better for both their capital expense and operating expense planning and budgets long term, as they look forward to deployments at new locations and upgrades of existing outdated switches.

The other benefit is reduced complexity and long-term costs by consolidating vendors. NETSCOUT is IT’s solution of choice for performance management and service assurance, as well as packet flow switching. Reducing issues and costs, otherwise associated with multiple IT providers, makes collaboration and seamless implementations possible for this pioneer in gaming. And it gives the IT staff more time to stay focused on their company’s core line of business – delivering quality gaming experiences to customers!