Mind Candy made its Moshi Monsters upgrade happen with Sun Technology: Sun Startup Essentials, Sun Fire X4170 and X4270 servers, Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System and Java SE6. Mind Candy achieved the upgrade with CPU utilization rates cut from 70 to 15 percent; Tomcat Web application server speed doubled; and the implementation of a cost-effective, eco-responsible infrastructure.

The Moshi Monsters game relies heavily on the IT platform managed by Mind Candy CTO Toby Moore and his IT staff. In Moore's view, the technology has to be totally reliable so that players come away from each session with the feeling that they have had a great experience and want to return. "Thanks to Sun technology, and particularly Sun Fire servers, the Moshi Monsters multiplayer social gaming phenomenon can continue to grow and deliver a great experience to audiences around the world," Moore says.

The Moshi Monsters infrastructure is based on Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) 6 running Debian GNU/Linux. It includes Apache Tomcat Web application servers, memcached and PostgreSQL databases as well as open source frameworks such as Spring and Hibernate. At the time that Mind Candy looked to update the platform, it featured Sun Fire X2100 servers, which acted as load balancers, and servers from IBM and HP. Storage was based on off-the-shelf commodity hardware. Despite being just one part of a mixed environment, the Sun technology stood out. Says Moore, "The performance and engineering quality of the Sun servers were superb. We also liked the support that Sun offered because it was always responsive and delivered by experts."

Moore reports that, "We were members of the Sun Startup Essentials program before we upgraded the Moshi Monsters platform. And we were impressed with the program's support for relatively new companies like ours. The program meant that we could buy enterprise-class hardware at a price that met our budgets, and at the same time we could gain specific advice and support for startup companies."

Working with Sun, Mind Candy planned to expand its infrastructure using Sun technology while keeping its existing equipment online. It finalized the design based on Sun Fire X4170 servers for applications work, along with a Sun Fire X4270 server for one of the platform's main databases. The Sun Fire X4170 servers gave Mind Candy significantly higher I/O speeds along with multithreading technology for greater performance and power management. The Sun Fire X4270 server provided over four times the processing performance and memory, as well as doubling the number of disk drive bays to 16. And with both models, the IT team gained power-efficient technology to minimize energy usage and Integrated Lights Out management to simplify administration.

Having established a new environment for its applications and database, Mind Candy has turned its attention to storage and plans to deploy a Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System. Moore says testing continues, but performance has been good, especially since the IT team attended a Sun Open Storage event organized by the Sun Startup Essentials program. Moore says, "We are now getting greater performance from our Sun storage tests, to the point where it could deliver real benefits to our IT infrastructure."

More Information

Brief audio of an interview with Mind Candy CTO Toby Moore

Sun Startup Essentials EMEA Manager Shares Sun's Approach with New Businesses

Sun's New Family of Servers Based on Intel Xeon 5500 Processor Series

Sun in the Open Source Storage Market [...read more...]

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