SEGA Games Co., Ltd., one of the world’s most famous interactive games companies, has significantly improved the stability, availability and manageability of its IT infrastructure by implementing enterprise cloud technology from Tintri, Inc. Tintri has enabled SEGA Games to cure a persistent conventional storage problem that left Sega Games’ IT team unable to monitor and control resources consumed by Virtual Machines (VMs). In addition, the time spent by the SEGA Games infrastructure team on storage operations has been reduced significantly.
With more than half of SEGA Games’ physical servers used to host virtualisation environments, where 2,000-3,000 VMs are running, Quality of Service (QoS) is vital to infrastructure stability. Previously, VMs consuming lots of storage I/O resources – or ‘Monster VMs’ – were affecting overall performance of other VMs using the same storage.
SEGA has purchased Tintri enterprise cloud technology for its primary and Disaster Recovery sites, with each unit taking only 30 minutes to configure. By moving to Tintri, SEGA Games was able to implement its auto-QoS function to automatically monitor storage I/O for each VM, greatly reducing the impact of ‘Monster VMs’ and simplifying management across the entire environment.
Additionally, SEGA Games has reported an approximate 2.2x data reduction in its storage environment, with each Tintri unit hosting up to 800VMs, with minimal impact on performance. The solution has also enabled more efficient data protection: snapshot and replication can be done every hour instead of the previous six hours, and the data replicated is reduced by dedupe and compression.
“Tintri’s ability to deliver auto-QoS has proved very effective in enabling us to improve the stability and availability of our infrastructure,” explained Kyohei Aso, who works in Infrastructure & DB Section at SEGA Games. “Some of the other companies’ storage also had auto-QoS functionality, but when we actually tested them, I/O was only mildly suppressed and the performance of other VMs was impacted. On the other hand, Tintri QoS greatly reduced the impact on other VMs.”
“The stability and availability of the IT infrastructure is of utmost importance to any organisation operating at the leading edge of their industry,” commented Yohei Yagishita, Tintri Japan. “By implementing Tintri enterprise cloud, SEGA Games’ infrastructure team have addressed both business and technical challenges giving them greater confidence in overall performance, and allowing their team to focus on more important challenges while Tintri automates.”
