Play to Win

Mervyn Alamgir, Director of Marketing at Mistletoe Technologies, looks at a winning combination of security and price/performance.

Businesses have evolved in the way that they communicate with their customers, suppliers and employees. This communication is designed to be ‘always on’ and accessible from anywhere, with the goal being to encourage the sharing of information that will result in greater company productivity. The move to bring more information available to the customer at the click of a button also puts an immense amount of responsibility on the systems that deliver the information to ensure that it arrives timely and complete. The network systems and infrastructure of a business is required to both support these business objectives and also to maximize performance while minimizing cost. Oftentimes, costs of network equipment are prohibitive, resulting in less than efficient solutions that sacrifice network performance and security.

Mistletoe Technologies is a developer of multi-gigabit security and bandwidth management appliances that address the need to provide cost-effective solutions. For the customer in the following case study, it was critical to provide not only the right solution to enable their business to continue to be productive, but also to stay within their budget while doing so.

Customer
Online gaming has become big business. Consulting firm DFC Intelligence estimates that the worldwide online gaming market will grow from US$4.5 billion in 2006 to more than US$13 billion by 2012. Our client specializes in massively multiplayer online playing (MMOPG) video games where a few to more than 100 players face off against each other. To support tens of thousands of concurrent players, the company has built a state-of-the-art data center.

Business challenge
Customer experience in the online gaming business is a key success factor. Reliability of the network connection is a major part of that experience. A player who reaches the final level of a game, only to get disconnected due to a dropped connection, is an unsatisfied customer. Too many dropped connections and the reputa¬tion – and future success – of the gaming com¬pany will suffer. This online gaming company’s existing solution from a leading network security vendor fit within the budget but delivered less than expected results, threatening the company’s reputation and business objectives.

Another concern was that like any network, online gam¬ing networks are subject to unauthorized access and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that can overwhelm web servers with massive numbers of service requests generated by hundreds of PCs under the control of hackers. Even a minor performance loss can affect online games –while a total shutdown can have a catastrophic impact on the bottom line.

Solution
What the online gaming company wanted was a reliable, easy-to-manage, cost-effective solution that would reduce or eliminate dropped connections, provide gigabit throughput, increase access control between racks and deliver strong protection against DDoS attacks. The online gaming company could re-install and expand its current solution from a leading network security vendor, but that product had already demonstrated its inability to keep up with the required network performance.

The company’s IT manager decided to evaluate Mistletoe Technologies’ SlimLine appliance after reading about it in a news article. Servers within the data center are rack mounted, with 10 servers per rack and each rack consisting of applications servers, database servers, billing servers and front-end web servers. SlimLine Firewall appliances were installed in each rack, providing multi-gigabit throughput per rack. SlimLine appliances front-end the servers, preventing any incoming traffic identified as DDoS from reaching the servers and impacting performance.

Benefits
The Mistletoe Technologies SlimLine Firewall solution delivers high-end performance at a cost-effective price. The SlimLine Firewall appliance has a compact form factor, roughly one-fifth the size of similarly performing appliances, which frees up limited rack space. Its small footprint and low power requirements provide the online gaming company with an economical alternative, reducing total cost of ownership by reducing rack space and electricity cost. The company was also able to increase network performance and security, further meeting its corporate objectives.