Background
i3D.net is a hosting provider operating a global network of 7000 servers in Rotterdam, Frankfurt, London, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Tokyo and Sydney. Bundled with our proprietary software we provide the hosted environment for many game titles on Microsoft Xbox360, Sony Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii, PC, Apple iOS and Android and we provide deployment and management software to our clients. Our server footprint grows with an average of 70% per year.

Dell offered us the opportunity to test the Dell R620 hardware in preparation of the launch of our private cloud offering. i3D.net is creating a customer setup on the Openstack software, with Dell hardware and adapted to hosting game environments such as scalable Facebook games and rich media Xbox Live (Arcade) titles.

Dell R620 Hardware
The Dell R620 has impressive hardware features compared to the 11th generation Dell server (Dell R610).

Hardware specs
Dual Socket Intel E5 offers increased performance, more cache, a multiple of cores. We tested the dual Intel E5-2660 setup with 20 MB L3 cache and 8 CPU cores per socket.

A total of 768 GB DDR3 memory is supported, running on 1666 MHz. Our test setup has 8x8GB = 64 GB DDR3 memory.

Chassis
The chassis will be available as 2.5″ hot swap configuration supporting 10 disks for a total of 20 TB disk space. This configuration has front VGA, no optic drive, no diagnostic front LED and does not support the SD card reader with front slot.

Other configuration options include a 4 disk 2.5″ system that supports all options including VGA port and optic drive. There is also a 6 disk and 8 disk chassis. For data center operations the front VGA port and diagnostic LED are only used to resolve hardware failures, where on-site staff is faster to respond than the external Dell 4 hour 24×7 support. The benefit is minimal thus our choice is the 10 drive chassis.

Network
The Dell R620 features an incredibly flexible network setup: the choice is between “on-board” Intel, Broadcom and another 3rd party network chips. The default configuration has 4 copper ports with 1 GbE. The network uses a click-on system so you are able to swap two ports to 10 GbE over copper. There is a fifth port for the iDrac 7 Enterprise card.

Dell Lifecycle Management
The Dell Lifecycle management is updated and now supports automatic plug and play driver and firmware configuration. If the controller detects new or changed hardware it will be able to recognize this hardware and update the firmware on demand. This is useful for motherboard updates if a new CPU generation is installed, if a PCI-E card is added, if a new SSD disk is installed or if one of the “on-board” NIC cards are swapped.

SD cards
The Dell R620 can boot from internal SD cards. One main card is installed and a secondary mirror card can be used for redundancy. This will make the Dell R620 a powerful disk-less server system in advanced cloud environments – where servers will be shutdown if not used, saving in energy consumption and data center cooling overhead costs. There is a third SD card installed near the back-plane and depending on the chassis you can insert a fourth SD card in the front bay.

The server also supports Fusion IO type of swappable cards, to improve the available system IO for specific tasks, such as databases.

Other carriers include Level3 (Amsterdam to Rotterdam and Rotterdam to Brussels) and NLIX, EUnetworks, Eurofiber and more.

“On a daily basis, more than one million people play games on Interactive 3D hosted servers, and our ultimate goal is to help our customers deliver the best online experience possible for those gamers in terms of low latency, stability and reliability,” said Stijn Koster, CEO of Interactive 3D. “With Level 3, we’re getting the scalability of a Tier 1 network at our fingertips and a team as committed to the customer experience as we are.”

Level 3’s services give Interactive 3D a flexible solution to meet growing demand for Internet connectivity from its games customers, further enable connectivity to European Internet exchanges and provide more peering options at multiple locations. The services are the result of Level 3 expanding its network presence in The Netherlands through the creation of a point-of-presence (PoP) in the SmartDC datacenter in Rotterdam.

“Our relationship with Interactive 3D in Rotterdam is largely the result of our commitment to deepening our presence in Europe, providing greater connectivity options and consistently delivering service excellence,” said James Heard, president of European Markets at Level 3. “We’re regularly identifying opportunities like this to provide more of the telecommunications services our customers want in the locations that will allow them to more effectively grow their businesses.”

The Level 3 PoP in Rotterdam is part of a broader company initiative to deepen its presence in Europe in line with demand. PoPs give customers a central point of secure and reliable access to Level 3’s highly scalable global network. In some cases, Level 3 will have several PoPs in a single city, giving customers access the telecommunications services they need in a location that is convenient for their business. Currently, Level 3’s network presence spans more than 20 European countries.

About Level 3 Communications
Level 3 Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: LVLT) is a leading international provider of fiber-based communications services. Enterprise, content, wholesale and government customers rely on Level 3 to deliver services with an industry-leading combination of scalability and value over an end-to-end fiber network. Level 3 offers a portfolio of metro and long-haul services, including transport, data, Internet, content delivery and voice. For more information, visit www.level3.com. Level 3 services are provided by wholly owned subsidiaries of Level 3 Communications, Inc.

About Interactive 3D
Interactive 3D B.V. (i3D.net) is a Rotterdam-based game server provider with hosting locations in Europe, the United States, Japan and Australia. Our software and hosting services are used by game developers and publishers worldwide to support triple A game titles. Visit www.i3d.net for more information on our global game services.

Over 1,000,000 gamers log on daily on i3D game servers. They own over 4,000 latest generation Intel Xeon servers and use both Windows 2008 and Linux. i3D hosts over 15,000 game and voice servers and are expanding rapidly. i3D reported 844% growth over the past years.

The Challenge
This new world arose from a basic desire, to control costs and ensure security and dependability. With the exponential growth of i3D, they needed to handle more and more clients and servers every day. The expansion meant an increase in customer support. With the high number of users, the greatest challenge for Stijn Koster, i3D’s CEO, was keeping up with the ever increasing number of resource issues and administration costs.

i3D uses an in-house developed Control Panel for total control on all their game, voice and web servers. “The challenge was to automate this process in order to lower and minimize our maintenance costs” said Stijn. “Network stability and uptime is foremost to our business”.

The Solution
The most important selling point of FireDaemon was its individuality and ease of use. “FireDaemon made it possible to automate a lot of work and is the direct result of a lower load on our support team”.
FireDaemon is a quick start for their in-house developed Control Panel Software. i3D have saved on a lot of development time and cost by implementing FireDaemon in January 2006, instead of building their own in-house solution. “FireDaemon is stable, fast and uses almost no resources. FireDaemon is unique and we are unable to find one single product with the same capabilities”.
Read more on: : i3D.net Game Forums i3D says “FireDaemon is the heart of all our software”

“FireDaemon is the heart of all of our software”

Results

With FireDaemon, i3D are able to automate a lot of standard jobs. They have tripled their completed support work with the same support staff in the last few months of installation. This accomplishment has helped i3D concentrate on what it does best: providing a cost effective, secure, stable and resilient network services to their clients.

About FireDaemon Technologies Limited FireDaemon Technologies Limited, based in Cambridge, UK is the world leader in service management solutions for Microsoft Windows and has been providing software solutions to the industry since 1996. FireDaemon Technologies Limited, a privately held corporation, has been successful in identifying market needs and providing tools to meet those needs including commercial and FOSS products such as FireDaemon Lite, FireDaemon Pro, FireDaemon Fusion, PanelDaemon and daeMON. More information on FireDaemon Technologies Limited is available at FireDaemon.com.

Source: http://www.firedaemon.com/pdf/i3d-case-study.pdf

The paperwork involved in the setup and organization of each and every participation is a time consuiming process – the more you do it, the easier it gets.