Download PDF
Multiplay selects Arista as networking foundation for innovative game server orchestration technology to help publishers deliver a scalable, high performance and cost efficient online gaming experience
Technology Category
- Networks & Connectivity - Ethernet
- Networks & Connectivity - Network Management & Analysis Software
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Facility Management
Use Cases
- Remote Control
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
- Training
The Challenge
The latest development is Multiplay’s hybrid cloud orchestration platform that helps publishers to cost effectively provision and scale multiplayer environments to meet peaks and troughs in demand while delivering the best possible gamer experience. As Tom Penrose, team lead for systems at Multiplay says, “Spending £50 on a brand new game and not being able to get online is just an awful experience for players and publishers are recognising that this type of situation is going to damage their brands.”\n\n“However, setting up and running potentially hundreds of game servers so that everything is in place on game launch day is a major CAPEX expenditure and risk, It’s sometimes hard to gauge demand for a new title and where it’s going to be coming from across the globe” says Penrose, “Games also evolve with new patches and mods that push and pull player numbers – even time of day is a critical factor.”\n\nAs a company that has spent 20 years working in the area of multiplayer infrastructure, Multiplay has built a number of tools to help provision and manage servers; both for itself and third party customers. The culmination of its development work is its hybrid cloud orchestration platform. The system is used to provision game servers across either its estate of bare metal servers co-located at data centres across the world or to spin up virtual servers in private clouds. The system is highly automated and dynamic allowing servers to be brought online during periods of demand and then released back into the pool as demand ebbs.
About The Customer
For over 20 years, games publishers have supported millions of gamers around the world using servers and tools from Multiplay. For the next generation, Multiplay has developed a revolutionary hybrid cloud orchestration platform that benefits from Arista networking technology to rapidly provision both physical and cloud based servers to ensure that capacity always meets demand while keeping costs as low as possible.\n\nProject Background\nFor many video gamers, the name Multiplay will bring back fond memories of glorious online victories and painful defeats. The company has been a pioneer in the provision of online gaming infrastructure and a host to some of the first LAN parties such as Insomnia and Stratlan that brought virtual groups together into the real world.\n\nWhen founder Craig Fletcher started the concept in 1997, the company grew quickly establishing itself as the server provider of choice for fans of Minecraft, Battlefield, and the CounterStrike series of games. Today, Multiplay supports the most popular multiplayer games and has established relationships working directly with some of the biggest names in the gaming and tech industry including Respawn, Tripwire, Ready At Dawn, Bohemia Interactive, EA, Facepunch, Rocketwerks, Hi Rez Studios and many more.
The Solution
As a deeply technical company, the development process for its orchestration platform endeavours to bring as much intelligence and automation as close to the network as possible, “We looked at the options and there was limited possibility of building automation into many of the networking solutions we considered” says Penrose, “It was only Arista that had the performance and the low latency we needed, but just as importantly for us, it’s effectively Linux on a switch which allows us to really optimise every aspect of our network infrastructure and bake in the automation features that are essential for the service.”\n\n“The other thing we liked about Arista was the support” adds Penrose, “We are doing some quite interesting and technical challenging things with the Arista switches and when we needed to speak to an Arista tech support, we would actually get an expert, not just somebody reading from a script – that was phenomenal.”\n\nAs part of a major data centre refresh to coincide with the new orchestration software, Multiplay has deployed Arista 7050X 10/40GbE switches with wire speed layer 2/3/4 performance combined with low latency at co-located data centres in London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Stockholm.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Factor-y S.r.l. – Establishes a cost-effective, security-rich development environment with SoftLayer technology
Factor-y S.r.l., a web portal developer, was faced with the challenge of migrating its development infrastructure to a reliable cloud services provider with highly responsive technical support. The company needed a solution that would not only provide a secure and reliable environment but also support its expansion by providing resources to create and deliver innovative offerings.
Case Study
Darwin Ecosystem: Accelerating discovery and insight through cutting-edge big data and cognitive technologies
Darwin Ecosystem was founded with a unique vision of harnessing chaos theory mathematics to uncover previously hidden connections in unstructured data. The company’s algorithms can look at all the data generated by any source (such as news, RSS feeds and Twitter), and analyze how a specific set of concepts within that data are evolving over time. This is particularly valuable in situations such as business and competitive intelligence, social research, brand monitoring, legal discovery, risk mitigation and even law enforcement. A common problem in these areas is that a regular web search will only turn up the all-time most popular answers to a given question – but what the expert researcher is actually interested in is the moment-tomoment evolution of the data available on that topic. Darwin’s algorithm is computationally intensive, and the sources of data it correlates can be vast. To bring its benefits to a larger commercial audience, Darwin needed to find a way to make it scale.
Case Study
Zend accelerates, simplifies PHP development
Zend Technologies, a major contributor to the PHP open source community, needed to keep pace with emerging trends such as mobility, agile development, application lifecycle management and continuous delivery. The company needed to provide the right tools to the worldwide community of PHP developers. The challenge was to support enterprise-class capabilities from end to end, including mobile, compliance and security. The pace of business required developers to show results fast across a variety of devices without compromising quality or security.
Case Study
Delivering modern data protection with cloud scale backup from Cobalt Iron and IBM
Organizations are struggling to modernize their legacy data protection environments in the face of growing demands around new infrastructure, new applications, and budget consolidation. Virtualization and modern application development processes have significantly outgrown legacy backup architectures. In response, infrastructure teams have created multiple backup solution types to handle the varying SLAs (performance, scale, cost) required by their business sponsors. However, the sheer number and variety of solutions in this uncontrolled expansion creates huge amounts of work, threatening to overwhelm the IT team in many organizations. Today, developers may add new applications and virtual server instances by the hundreds per day without accounting for the restrictions of the existing backup infrastructure. They leverage the cloud for immediate compute and storage resources, yet rarely communicate succinctly with corporate IT to ensure that the appropriate data protection services are in place.
Case Study
Achieving near limitless scalability and flexibility with data in the cloud
Web-based publishing platform SpaceCraft found that as its client base grew, it was spending an increasing amount of time managing its databases, distracting its focus from product innovation. As its user base rapidly expanded, data volumes at SpaceCraft began to rise dramatically. Along with their main focus on maintaining and further developing a great platform for web publishing, the SpaceCraft team had the added pressure of managing the increasing quantities of data while ensuring ongoing high performance for clients.
Case Study
nViso SA – Delivers emotion recognition solutions worldwide with a scalable SoftLayer hosting solution
nViso SA, a company that provides emotion recognition solutions, was in need of a high-performance cloud hosting infrastructure. The company wanted to extend its services to a global customer base. The challenge was to find a solution that could handle the demands of their growing customer base and the need for high performance and reliability.
