Case Study: Starbreeze Studios, AB Optimizes Developer Productivity And Manages Explosive Data Growth With BlueArc Storage For VMware

The bedrock of Starbreeze's business is to deliver to video game publishers high-quality productions at critical milestones throughout the project. Anything that impedes the developer's ability to deliver on schedule impacts revenue and causes the business to suffer, potentially jeopardizing subsequent contracts from the video game publishers.

When Starbreeze started working on titles for Sony® Playstation 3® and Microsoft® Xbox 360® they saw a massive increase of data involved in these projects. The amount of data didn't simply double, it was exponential. Developers were often complaining about performance and volumes on file servers were quickly filling up. It was clear the developer's productivity was being negatively impacted, thus jeopardizing their ability to meet delivery schedules. Starbreeze administrators had to spend a lot of time moving data between file servers to even out the load. Backups were also becoming a problem as the amount of data grew larger. Starbreeze quickly realized the IT infrastructure to support their growing projects was getting difficult to manage as the number of systems had increased significantly. They realized that it was necessary to consolidate, find a faster storage solution and improve the speed of their network.