case study | Creative Assembly
IF you refuse a technology request in most companies, it's not likely to provoke much more than a few brief mutterings, but if you're on the cutting edge of the interactive games business, you won't get off so lightly.
George Fidler general manager of Sega-owned interactive game maker, The Creative Assembly, says letting technical limits block the artistic spirit in the interactive entertainment business is risky.
Well-paid artists and programmers may start looking at their employment options.
"When you're working with creative people they tend not to focus on the technical side of things.
"When they come up with a requirement they don't ask how they can get that done, they say they have a requirement and how quickly can it be done."
This was one of the problems the Brisbane company faced when its ageing servers and storage equipment became a production bottleneck.
The company was facing an equally high risk of failing to hit deadlines.
About two years ago employees started losing valuable time as technical staff struggled to revive beige-box servers and storage systems designed for $2 million games projects that fell over under the weight of those with budgets of $15 million. In some instances, Fidler says, the company was bleeding $30,000 daily in production costs without even considering lost sales each day from game products failing to reach the market in time.
It was also at risk of losing millions of dollars worth of digitally stored intellectual property developed by the company each month.
Creative Assembly technical manager Matt Palowski started taking steps to address the problem mid-2006.
It took about 12 months to plan the project and have the business case approved by Sega head office. The company decided to spend about $300,000 installing a new server and storage infrastructure. It chose a virtualised server environment based on VMWare software and a NetApp Network Area Storage system as the core of its production environment.
"Our old system was basically ad hoc, and every time you needed to provide a new solution, be it more storage or an application server, you had to do a lot of research and work out what was going to work together.
"You had to make sure the white box you were working with had the performance in the correct places for the application you were trying to deploy," Mr Palowski said.
Since installing the new system the company has been more responsive to the needs of its artists and programmers.
It also has some flexibility to expand its production capacity should it exceed the limits of its current hardware.
"NetApp is customisable and scalable in the sense that if we need more storage we buy more disks for it. "If we exceed the performance of the controllers, we replace them," he says.
The company says it is more ready to move ahead with its strategy to enter the console games market, which requires far more capacity from its studio than the desktop games environment it has traditionally targeted.
THE PROBLEM
Creative Assembly needed to react to the needs of interactive games artists and programmers and cut development time.
THE PROCESS
The company deployed new server and storage infrastructure, with NetApp's NAS system at its core.
THE RESULT
It can expand the capacity of its production system without lengthy technical research and integration work.