pogo.com
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Lighthearted Pursuit Takes Serious Compute Power
"More than a year and 250 servers later, we continue to be pleased with their performance. The Netra t1 Model 100/105 servers have scaled as we've grown, met performance and uptime requirements, and helped us keep costly data center expenses to a minimum. Netra servers should continue to play a lead role in our IT infrastructure."
David King pogo.com, Inc., a division of EA.com, the online subsidiary of Electronic Arts, operates the leading online games service targeting the rapidly expanding "family games" market. Since launching its service less than three years ago, pogo.com has experienced exponential growth, with usage increasing to more than 33 million hours per month and its registered member base ballooning to more than 18 million consumers. To support its continuing rapid growth, pogo.com relies on Sun's Netra t1 Model 100/105 servers. "We got the Netra t1 Model 100/105 servers installed as the production network in early 2000, and almost 95 percent of our operations were moved to these servers," says David King, chief technical officer and vice chairman of pogo.com. Shuffling Servers In addition to supporting an expanding user base, pogo.com must also deal with radical spikes in traffic. To keep games running, pogo.com occasionally reallocates game servers on the fly. "When traffic spikes, we can literally pick up Netra servers from an underutilized subnet and move them to another to meet capacity requirements," says Jason Kawamura, pogo.com's director of network operations. Achieving Maximum Uptime Good games bring customers to pogo.com, but uptime keeps them coming back. "With Netra t1 Model 100/105 servers, we are able to achieve virtually 99.9% uptime for our systems," says Kawamura. Sun's NEBS Level-3 certified Netra t1 Model 100/105 servers' front-accessible, hot-pluggable SCSI disks also help pogo.com minimize downtime. "The hot-swappable hard drives in Netra t1 Model 100/105 servers allow us to get a game back up and running in a few minutes or even less. If we had to set up a new server, it could take us an hour or more to load the software and configure the system," Kawamura says. Plans for Continuing Growth pogo.com plans to continue to use Netra servers for its core infrastructure. In addition to Netra t1 Model 100/105 servers, pogo.com is evaluating Sun Microsystems, Inc.'s new Netra T1 AC200/DC200 servers and Netra X1 servers. "The Netra T1 AC200/DC200 server is very interesting to us, since it offers much of the functionality and size benefits of Netra t1 Model 100/105 servers at half the price. We are also looking at the new Netra X1 servers that also have the size, reliability, and manageability of Netra t1 Model 100/105 servers but are designed to meet enterprise requirements," says King. | |||||||||||||
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