Mansion.com

Success at a Glance

In the global online gaming and betting marketplace, there are millions of players to support and games to play. Continuous availability, ease of use and transparency of transaction reporting are essential to every player. At any given time, the players must have access to their transactions, gaming history, outstanding bets and cash balances. Mansion.com provides a “one-stop” holistic gambling and betting experience with cash accounts for players in the currency of their choice. Each player’s account can be used across the different betting, casino and multi-player games, and all transactions are processed online and real-time on a 24x7x365 basis.

Mansion.com operates its gaming site out of Gibraltar, a British-governed dependent territory that measures just 1.5 km by 6 km. Available land is scarce and comes at a premium cost. In addition, hundreds of power-hungry servers would take a huge toll on the national power grid of the territory. These factors required that Mansion.com look for a reliable and easily and cost-effectively scalable IT system that occupies a small footprint and is low on power consumption. “Our IT infrastructure is core to our business,” says David Kinsman, Chief Operating Officer for Mansion.com. “For us, it is imperative that our IT servers and systems are nothing short of the very best.”

The company’s existing Linux and Windows servers running on various x86 blade servers posed serious challenges with scalability problems and performance issues. “Having different platforms raises its own set of difficulties,” says Kinsman. “We are also concerned about the reliability of our existing systems, particularly with the issue of continuous availability since we cannot afford downtime.” With its business set for a period of major expansion, the company looked for a standard technology platform that would scale easily and reliably, and offer high performance at a level that is cost-effective. Mansion.com also needed to be confident that the power grid is able to support its servers.

After a stringent evaluation of various technology platforms and vendors, Mansion.com chose Sun’s Solaris 10 Operating System running on Sun Fire T2000 servers. Each T2000 CPU is an eight-core processor that can support up to 32 simultaneous processing threads—increasing performance threefold while reducing power consumption and rack space by the same ratio, compared to competitive servers. T2000’s ultra-low wattage Coolthreads technology is an eco-friendly choice that delivers the required power with a punch, and with record-breaking low-heat emissions. “We are investing wisely by consolidating our servers,” concludes Kinsman. “In the past, each application has run on a single server, which led to over-provisioning, because we had to provision based on peak capacity. In addition, with the new Sun servers we are saving costs on rack space because of the small footprint, as well as on cooling costs because of the low heat.” With the high-availability, robustness and predictive self-healing features of Solaris 10, the company is assured of the continuous uptime needed to support a round-the-clock business never stops.