Infortrend Works with Wayi to Start a New Page for Online Games

Infortrend Works with Wayi to Start a New Page for Online Games

In terms of both history and scale, Wayi International is Taiwan's leading developer of online games. After a long time of planning and development, Wayi announced an online game masterwork Fei Xian On-line this April. This game takes a classic Chinese swordsman story as its background. Since Wayi released it for public play testing, many players have been attracted by the settings and characters portrayed in ink and wash painting and the various unique task designs. To provide players with quality service, Wayi needs RAID arrays which can serve as the storage for the game server and meet the demand for high performance and service reliability. Infortrend's new-generation RAID subsystem is their final decision

IT Environment Needs

For servers, Wayi chose the 1U and 2U products from foreign leading companies but for storage, they turned to Taiwan's local company, Infortrend. Infortrend's EonStor A12FG2422 is used to do disk-to-disk backup for the gaming database.

EonStor A12F-G2422 Chosen as the Ideal Storage

Infortend's EonStor A12F-G2422 is a 2U, 12-bay, FC-to-SATA RAID subsystem. It provides 4Gb FC host channels and supports 12 SATA-II drives for large capacity. Comparing to the products from foreign companies that provide only 2G FC host channels and support SATA-I drives, EonStor A12F-G2422 is significantly better. However, Wayi understands that satisfactory specification does not necessarily lead to satisfactory performance in practice. Therefore, before they did the purchasing, they compared many RAID subsystems of different brands and conducted strict testing at our installation site. Since EonStor A12F-G2422 led the ranking in many aspects, without any hesitation, Wayi chose it as the backup storage system for Fei Xian On-line gaming database.

According to An Xie, Wayi believes cultivating experienced information management staff is a necessary step to provide players with the best service quality. Therefore, besides the technical personnel with expertise on Internet technology, database and information security, Wayi also employs those with storage expertise. Few Taiwan's local companies do the same. “We always do the testing comparison carefully. When designing the testing, we take into consideration our real needs and conduct it in the real environment following the selfdeveloped process. The testing scope includes Read/Write performance for different block size settings, capability for remote management, burn-in and etc.” After the strict testing, Wayi found that EonStor A12F-G2422's performance was significantly good in reading and writing the files whose block size was larger than 64 KB. IT personnel can access the GUI of Web-based RAIDWatch management software via Internet. In Wayi's IT environment where multiple installation sites are dispersed at different locations, the intuitive design of RAIDWacth can help the company largely reduce management tasks. Wayi also configured RAID5 arrays and conducted faulttolerant testing about the hot-swap capability of hard drives on it. As a result, the system functioned normally, the data were intact and array rebuilding was done in a short time.

Proven Benefits EonStor Array Brought

An Xie states: “To an online game company, ideal RAID storage systems should provide good price/performance ratio, stability for long-term operation and comprehensive management features. Until now, we are quite satisfied with using EonStor A12F-G2422 as the storage for Fei Xian On-line database in our data center. We once held stereotype for the storage systems from local companies, assuming that their cheap price implies bad quality. Infortrend's products totally overturn this stereotype. In the future, when we need to expand the database of Fei Xien On-line or purchase storage systems for other games, Infortrned's arrays will surely be our first choice.”

EonStor A12F-G2422: 2U/12-bay, 4G-FC to SATA RAID subsystem

• Two (2) 4G-FC host channels
• Twelve 3Gbps SATA-II hot-swappable drive trays
• Supports RAID 0, 1 (0+1), 3, 5, 10, 30, 50, and JBOD
• Redundant, hot-swappable hardware modules
• RAID5 end-to-end configuration performance
  - Sequential Read: 545MB/sec
  - Sequential Write: 345MB/sec