World Fantasy Games Drafts Marathon Technologies - Locks up Top-Tier Application Availability Player
THE COMPANY
World Fantasy Games(WFG) is the world leader in fantasy sports social gaming, having created and operated fantasy games for more than 400 media, web and corporate partners since 1993. Its impressive current and past partner list includes USA Today, Coors Light, Chicago Tribune and Clear Channel Radio. The company currently operates the web sites RapidDraft.com, SportsBuff.com and FantasySportsBusiness.com and a global network of affiliate, white label and partner sites called the World Fantasy Games Network. To date, WFG has processed more than three million fantasy game entries and paid more than $4 million in prizes.RapidDraft.com, enable these users to draft and manage their team at any time, day or night. It's imperative that our games and sites are available 24x7 to keep the games competitive, active and users satisfied. Can you imagine if RapidDraft® went down on a Sunday morning in October? We would have mad, panicked gamers and damaged our partner's brand," said Jeffrey Thomas, CEO of World Fantasy Games. "We needed to find an application availability solution that could ensure that our games and services would be always on."
THE PROBLEM
Aristocrat had begun to use a new gaming application called Multi-Site Progressive (MSP) System, where slot machine players at casinos around the U.S. are connected, permitting them to play for combined jackpots. The Nevada Gaming Control, the state regulatory agency, requires redundancy in these systems to minimize downtime on the jackpot links.
THE SITUATION
To effectively support its growing global customer base and expanding set of fantasy sports games and web sites, WFG determined that they needed to support their sites in-house instead of relying on third-party hosting providers. Because reliability of their sites for large, national brands was so important, they had to select and implement an availability solution that would deliver continuous availability.
"Millions of people from countries around the world can be updating their fantasy roster on any given day. Our sites, like
THE SOLUTION
After WFG evaluated various availability solutions, the team agreed that Marathon's everRun® application availability software was the most cost-effective solution that would provide the level of protection and 24x7 availability the company required. WFG chose Marathon's everRun software with Citrix XenServer to guarantee that its fantasy games like RapidDraft.com, would be operational at all times.
"We considered solutions from VMware and other vendors, but Marathon's everRun proved to be the most cost-effective and solid choice for what we were looking to accomplish," added Thomas.
everRun pools the physical resources of two or more standard Windows servers into a single, unified operating environment. It virtualizes these servers to appear and operate as one for the purpose of ensuring continuous availability for Windows applications. The environment appears and operates as though the applications were running on a single stand-alone server with one identity and one IP address.
THE RESULTS
Since WFG completed the everRun implementation, the company's network of fantasy games and sites have maintained the highest level of availability. Even through cases of server disruptions, Marathon's technology enabled WFG to keep applications up and running with zero interruption for customers.
"We had a few occurrences in the past year where we've experienced a problem with a server, but our gaming customers didn't experienced any downtime because everRun kept the applications working straight through as if there were no server problems at all," added Thomas.
As the popularity of fantasy sports continues to grow every year, nearing 30 million players , WFG will continue to expand its IT infrastructure to support the additional games and services it offers to its global customer base. "As we expand our social gaming infrastructure and our server farm, we will look to everRun for the continued protection we need." added Thomas.
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