The online gaming industry continues to grow rapidly and competition is fierce to secure customer loyalty. Reliable IT and network capabilities will remain at the forefront.
MANSION (Gibraltar) Limited is a fully licensed gaming company headquartered in Gibraltar, employing over 130 industry experts and member support staff.
MANSIONPOKER.NET is a free play online poker site where players can hone their strategy and qualify for seats in leading tournaments. Most recently online players were competing for a seat and a chance to share in the $2million-plus prize pool at the MANSIONPOKER.NET Poker Dome Challenge in Las Vegas. MANSIONPOKER.NET has attracted over 200,000 registered players since launching in late May 2006.
“A highly resilient infrastructure is fundamental to the success and continued growth of our business – even the shortest outage of service would be damaging and result in players turning to our competitors’ online gaming environments,” said Grant Brett, Head of IT at MANSION.
Rather than build an in-house infrastructure solution that would require significant capital expenditure and take a considerable amount of time to set up, the company has instead opted to outsource its data centre requirements. There is a clear market trend for companies with high volume computing needs to outsource rather than overburdening internal resources with building and managing an IT infrastructure platform.
“Building our own data centre was never on the cards. It makes good business sense for us to seek out subject-matter experts who are better positioned to do this for us.” continued Brett The decision to outsource was driven by several critical business demands:
- Availability. The growing popularity of online gaming has made it imperative that MANSIONPOKER.NET is available to its customers around-the-clock across all time zones. Therefore, the infrastructure has to be built robustly with multiple fail over, resilience and redundancy. To replicate this effectively would be prohibitive.
- Security. As an online gaming company, MANSION holds the personal details of all its players. To gain the trust of its users, the standards of governance and security, both physical and online, have to be at the same level as any financial institution. Again, to replicate this effectively would be prohibitive.
- Growth. As MANSION’s customer base has increased, its central IT footprint has grown steadily to cater for organic growth and an increasing global target market. Having a datacentre partner that can quickly react to the changing pace of these requirements and has scalability is essential for servicing market demand.
- Speed to market. Designing, building and deploying a highly redundant data centre may take over 12 months. As the market has seen explosive growth, it has been essential that the company be able to service the market today or risk loss of market share
Based on these drivers, MANSION developed a list of requirements that were used to asses each potential partner. These requirements included:
- Carrier neutrality. MANSION required a connectivity solution that enabled them to utilize multiple carriers. This enabled them to maximize availability of their service whilst also ensuring minimum network latency.
- Enterprise class infrastructure. The ability of the data centre to provide multiple infrastructure redundancy (power and cooling) ensuring MANSION systems run 24/7/365 (N + 1).
- Scalability. A flexible solution that would allow for on-demand growth was a necessity. This had to allow MANSION to scale its infrastructure ensuring that the vendor had both the power capacity to provide over 6 KVA per rack and associated cooling in addition to actual physical space.
- Location. MANSION required a location that was accessible, and minimised network latency especially with the USA and ASIA.
- Proven reputation. The provider needed a proven track record in delivering and operating highly resilient high density blade server environments.
As part of the outsourcing project scope, MANSION had identified that Ireland provided the best European site to locate its IT infrastructure. Ireland offers ultra low network latency to Asia and North America ensuring MANSION’s global customers are playing each other in real time. MANSION is one of a number of international gaming companies who have located their ICT infrastructure in Ireland, where they have the technical benefits as well as the added value of working with a highly skilled workforce with an understanding of their business needs.
“Interxion Ireland was chosen as MANSION’s data centre partner because it met every one of our technical requirements and has the relevant experience,” Brett concluded.
Interxion Ireland hosts a number of high density computing environments deploying high-density racks in shared and private areas. The Data Centre has been architected to provide up to 20 KVa per rack which is adequate to meet with the most demanding high density computing environments. Power and cooling infrastructure have also been built with excess capacity to ensure that Interxion can meet demand now and into the future.