StorPool Storage Helped Game Studio Imperia Online to Achieve “100% Uptime and 3 times Faster” Load Time

Imperia Online Ltd, a big game production companies in Europe, chose StorPool Ltd to ensure 100% uptime and 3 times faster load time for its 40 million users.

The biggest challenges in the gaming industry, which Imperia Online was also experiencing, were providing low latency of their games, keeping safe the players’ data and being always accessible. Players have high expectations. The services Imperia Online offers are data driven. They want their customers to be highly invested and spend a lot of time with the game. This means that poor performance is untenable. They needed a storage solution, which provides a competitive advantage, by decreasing the latency and page load time and eliminating any possible hardware related downtime.

Prior to implementing StorPool, Imperia Online used DAS storage with a mixture of HDDs and SSDs. They also tested hardware SANs from various vendors. However, the company was searching for better performance and uptime to keep the customers engaged and satisfied with the game.

The technical team of Imperia Online set out to make their service both highly available and incredibly fast as a speed in order to satisfy their customers’ high expectations. They wanted to move from the complicated solution they have built internally to something simpler and more powerful. After testing several other solutions, Imperia Online chose StorPool as a fit, delivering a solution with blazing speed at a fair price.

By implementing StorPool, Imperia Online reduced its page loading time 3 fold: from 200-300ms per page to 75-100ms. This makes them 4 times faster than theirs biggest competitors. Migrating their databases to software-defined storage with high IO/s numbers played a significant part in the whole optimization. Another feature of their shared storage is live migration of VMs between hypervisors, ensuring always-up production environments.

StorPool enhanced the gaming experience so much, that Imperia Online has double the number of players in the key target markets, who are willing to spend money to augment their experience.

Advantages after deploying StorPool: 

• Scalability: both volume and IO/s-wise
• Redundancy and no downtime
• End-to-end data protection
• Decreased page loading time
• 100% reliability

“StorPool was a great fit and a very successful decision we made and I will recommend it to anybody. In the gaming industry you need to be always available and people take this for granted. You need to have an SDS technology to keep the players safe all the time. This technology provides great performance on a reasonable price and gives you a competitive edge. You do not have to worry about technology and can start thinking about your core business, which is making games,” said Dobroslav Dimitrov, co-founder, Imperia Online.

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