Gaming Companies Eye Storage

Execs in the computer gaming industry are planning to overhaul their storage strategies to cope with spiraling user demand, new high-resolution technologies, and bandwidth issues.

One such firm is Linden Lab, creator of the online game Second Life, where players create characters that inhabit an online world. More than half a million people currently "live" in this parallel universe, and Philip Rosedale, the Linden Lab CEO, estimates that this figure is growing by as much as 20 percent a month. "The average user creates enormous amounts of data," he says.

Currently, Second Life uses 3 Tbytes of usable memory spread across 1,000 Opteron processor-based servers to support its players, backed up by a 30-Tbyte Isilon cluster. (See Isilon, PolyServe Pick Up Funding, Isilon Expands, and Isilon Touts Deals.)

But Rosedale told Byte and Switch that he has an eye on the future. "The big thing that I am waiting to see in storage is more like Google Base or Amazon's S3," he explains. He is particularly intrigued by the latter. (See Amazon Takes Aim at Hosted Storage.)

Google Base, which is currently in beta test, is a free content hosting service. Users can either post individual items via a Web form or upload a number of items using formats such as RDF Site Summary (RSS).Amazon's S3, which stands for Simple Storage Service, is essentially a Web services interface to Amazon's own back-end storage. The idea is that firms develop and employ applications on Amazon's systems via the Internet, removing the need to buy their own storage hardware. (See Follow the Amazon.)

Launched earlier this year, Amazon charges on a monthly basis for its S3 service; 15 cents per Gbyte of data stored and 20 cents for each Gbyte moved on or off Amazon's systems.

Rosedale admits that he finds this pricing structure appealing. "The cost model is easy to understand," he says. "[S3] is as easy as HTTP in terms of its store and retrieval model."

But it is not just user demand that is placing a strain on gaming firms. Increasingly, according to Roy Rabey, IT manager at Dallas-based Ensemble Studios, gaming companies are relying on complex rendering techniques more traditionally associated with Hollywood movies.

"Because these cinematics are so high-resolution, you need a lot of disk storage and compute power to render them," he explains. "You have to look at investing in additional storage and a render farm [of servers]," he says. He may deploy these technologies within the next year.Rendering is essentially an advanced form of animation, which creates complex three-dimensional images from computer models. Hollywood movie-maker Pixar, for example, was forced to overhaul its own storage strategy to cope with the rendering demands of its recent release, Cars. (See Pixar.)

Although Ensemble Studios, which developed the Age of Empires series, is not creating feature-length movies, the firm plans to use rendering for two-minute trailers and as a reward for players that reach certain levels within games.

Currently, the firm relies on a mixture of direct-attached storage to support its business, including 12 Tbytes spread across EMC Clariions and SATA drives from Silicon Mechanics . The firm also has another 20 Tbytes of ADIC tape storage and uses around 20 Intel-processor-powered Dell servers to provide its compute power.

Direct-attached storage, according to Rabey, has its cost benefits, removing the need to invest in expensive Fibre Channel switches. This, he estimates, saves the company around $20,000 each time it deploys new storage technology.

The exec says he is considering breaking with tradition for his render farm and may deploy networked attached storage and blade servers. It is still early days for this plan, and Rabey has not contacted any vendors yet."Potentially, [blade servers] reduce the cost of implementing a render farm," he says, explaining that blades will offer greater density than rack-mounted servers. "If your application is CPU intensive, it's probably going to be less expensive to deploy that on a blade."

The big attraction of NAS is its performance. "With so many servers hammering to the same disk storage, we would probably get better performance out of a network attached solution than direct attached," he says, adding that this will help avoid bottlenecks.

James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch