Activision launches games faster with Riverbed

David Spark, reporting from CIO Boot Camp at Interop in Las Vegas.

If you're managing gigabytes of data for development, QA, and collaboration, having a WAN optimization device, like those provided by Riverbed, can be critical. Thomas Fenady, Senior Director of Information Technology of Activision Publishing, Inc. told his company's story to the audience at CIO Boot Camp.

Fenady began explaining that at Activision, IT services are responsible for the entire business cycle, from production, publishing, and finally distribution. Given the global nature of Activision, their wide area network is key to their business. Without it the company couldn't run. It's key to game development, quality assurance, their database (they use Oracle ERP), and e-mail.

Being that their WAN is critical to all operations, Fenady realized that if Activision can maximize bandwidth utilization it will minimize cost. But they had a lot of problems to overcome, such as:

• Network topology was confusing and there was lots of TCP congestion
• Through continuous mergers they inherited a mishmash of network topology including traditional T1, Frame Relay, and low bandwidth MPLS links
• Overloaded pipes were unreliable. Activision had to deal with previously-installed band-aids and patches rather than true fixes. Few sites could speak to one another.
• Game build transfers took up to eight hours. Submitting games for testing or any collaboration was very difficult.

This problem wasn't going to get better on its own as data transfer around the world became far more taxing. With the evolution of next generation consoles, development teams grew and overall development became more complex.

• Game builds grew exponentially, from CD (650 MB) to Blueray DVDs (as much as 52 GB).
• QA and development offices in U.S., Europe, Canada, and China made game development a global affair.
• Inter-studio collaboration, external partnerships and transcontinental development, testing and shipping required new, cost-effective solutions.

IT wanted to add value by improving transfer speeds and lowering development costs.

In 2003 Activision's network was a disjointed non-communicative network. After a year of rebuilding, and despite ongoing acquisitions the IT team managed to clean up the 34 sites. In July of 2008 Activision went through a large merger and inherited a brand new giant mess. An additional 32 sites with a lot of migration and consolidation that needed to happen quickly. Here's a summary of the challenges, solutions, and results.

Activision had the following migration challenges:

• Basic communications - Get two disparate networks of 32 sites each communicating on day one.
• Aggressive synergy goals.
• Bill reconciliation - how to perform cost analysis and gain synergies.
• Site reconciliation - which sites would remain up and which ones would go down.

Solution #1: Reduce bandwidth costs

• They got rid of the expensive MPLS and DS3's which had high monthly and capital investment costs. They leveraged new MetroWAN technologies that lowered their price per megabyte while doubling bandwidth.

Solution #2: Riverbed Steelheads

• Recently, many developers have brought WAN optimizers to market. Activision looked at a lot of competitors, such as Cisco, but chose Riverbed because they used both TCP optimization, compression, caching, and application-specific optimization to improve throughput.

Using Riverbed WAN optimizing devices, Activision's challenges were met and exceeded

• Full communications on all sites.
• Identified sites that were closed within 60 days.
• Remaining sites were integrated to ATVI standards.
• Synergies were exceeded.
• Plus 3 post-merger acquisitions were also integrated into the ATVI network

Costs for the Riverbed devices ranged from a few thousand to tens of thousands of dollars depending upon bandwidth need. Fenady said that the higher bandwidth (<45 mbs) devices can get costly, as much as $50K. But there was a dual benefit to those high end devices. They saved time, plus utilized the maximum bandwidth available.

In the end, Activision saw direct business benefits from deploying Riverbed WAN optimization devices.

• Game build transfer time reduced from 4+ hours to only 30 minutes.
• Efficient NetApp snapshot replication allowed for an effective disaster recovery model.
• Time to market decreased allowing for faster and more efficient testing cycles.
• Increased and faster testing cycles provided better quality assurance.
• By maximizing available bandwidth, they had more efficient bandwidth utilization.

File transfer was truly the biggest advantage, but that trickled down to all other business processes.

Make sure you watch my interview with Thomas Fenady as he talks about the pressures of delivering quickly with the ever increasing demands of game development.

For more, check out all of Riverbed's Interop '09 Las Vegas coverage.