Cisco Cisco Nexus 2224TP GE Fabric Extender Leaflet
Challenge
Established in 1991, Epic Games is a gaming company with an additional capability.
It produces best-selling video game titles including the billion-dollar Gears of War
franchise for Xbox 360 and the award-winning Infinity Blade series for the iPad,
iPod touch, and iPhone. The foundation of Epic’s business, however, is a game
development platform that the company builds called the Unreal Engine, which is
used by thousands of game developers worldwide.
It produces best-selling video game titles including the billion-dollar Gears of War
franchise for Xbox 360 and the award-winning Infinity Blade series for the iPad,
iPod touch, and iPhone. The foundation of Epic’s business, however, is a game
development platform that the company builds called the Unreal Engine, which is
used by thousands of game developers worldwide.
Since launching the Gears of War franchise, Epic’s year-to-year growth exceeded
all expectations. With resources stretched to the limit, no one had time to design
an IT architecture flexible and scalable enough to keep up with this growth. “When
I arrived in 2009,” says Mark Nilsson, director of IT at Epic Games, “I found a
hodgepodge of band-aids on top of band-aids, and the chaos that results from
throwing servers at problems without an overall strategy in mind.”
all expectations. With resources stretched to the limit, no one had time to design
an IT architecture flexible and scalable enough to keep up with this growth. “When
I arrived in 2009,” says Mark Nilsson, director of IT at Epic Games, “I found a
hodgepodge of band-aids on top of band-aids, and the chaos that results from
throwing servers at problems without an overall strategy in mind.”
Nilsson’s challenge was exacerbated by the fact that the stakes for Epic were
so high. Game developers are passionate about what they do, and are famous
for pushing technology to the limits, and having extremely high expectations of
vendors. “We provide engine code for gaming companies all over the world,” says
Nilsson. “They have no tolerance for delays or errors. When they need to access
our servers to download patches and updates, they need to do it on their terms, on
demand, in real time. Otherwise, their development cycles suffer, ship dates slip,
and they lose money.”
so high. Game developers are passionate about what they do, and are famous
for pushing technology to the limits, and having extremely high expectations of
vendors. “We provide engine code for gaming companies all over the world,” says
Nilsson. “They have no tolerance for delays or errors. When they need to access
our servers to download patches and updates, they need to do it on their terms, on
demand, in real time. Otherwise, their development cycles suffer, ship dates slip,
and they lose money.”
Epic itself needs a high-performance data center and network for development of its
own titles. Advances in the technology required to create a wildly popular game such as
Gears of War 3 made it important to revamp the network infrastructure from a 1-gigabit
to 10-gigabit Ethernet framework and redesign the server farm used to compile code.
own titles. Advances in the technology required to create a wildly popular game such as
Gears of War 3 made it important to revamp the network infrastructure from a 1-gigabit
to 10-gigabit Ethernet framework and redesign the server farm used to compile code.
1 © 2012 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Executive Summary
Customer Name:
Epic Games
Industry:
Gaming
Location:
Cary, North Carolina
Number of Employees:
255
Challenge:
• Scale IT infrastructure to support
accelerating growth, with minimal impact
to business
to business
• Build environment robust enough to satisfy
extremely demanding users / customers
• Keep IT costs contained by finding platform
that could be centrally managed with
limited staff
limited staff
Solution:
• Refresh hardware from one- and two-rack
physical servers to virtualized blades
• Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS)
offers maximum flexibility and ability to
manage both blade and rack-mount
servers from one central management
console
manage both blade and rack-mount
servers from one central management
console
• Cisco Nexus 5000 and 2000 Series
Switches update network to 10GbE to
enhance performance
enhance performance
Results:
• Reduced time to provision new servers
from two to three days to minutes,
improving operational efficiency
improving operational efficiency
• Managed to keep staffing levels down,
while doubling size of hardware
infrastructure
infrastructure
• Decreased operational costs, including
power and cooling, as well as time to bring
new apps to market
new apps to market
Customer Case Study
Gaming Company Virtualizes for
‘World’s Most Demanding Users’