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As a premium supplier of online casino games, NetEnt services' are used by many of the world's most successful online casino operators. NetEnt's CasinoModule creates the ultimate gaming experience for the player, while managing billions of transactions every year, giving online casino operators full control and management of their casino activities. Operators are provided with a customised casino that is easily integrated ensuring short time to market and a cost efficient operation.

NetEnt operates its business from several data centres across the globe, including the company's data centre in Malta. Supporting a vast degree of varying sized customers, with different cross-border compliance regulations, NetEnt's Infrastructure Architect, Anders Redaner faces a 24x7x365 global challenge to ensure zero downtime in a highly performant infrastructure, to prevent storage from disrupting critical applications and to work across heterogeneous systems and diverse legal requirements.

ELIMINATING SINGLE POINTS OF FAILURE
"100% safety of customer data and high availability 24/7 of hosted services has always been our top priority," comments Redaner. "In our previous hardware based environment, we had identified potential single points of failure using our existing high capacity storage arrays operating as isolated islands which we needed to address and federate."

Indeed, it was the management of different models of hardware used to support different customer scenarios that caused NetEnt to spend far too much time on migrating customer systems between arrays. Firmware upgrades could not be guaranteed with 100% data security and availability, also performance and capacity issues proved to be inflexible, hard to solve and costly to fix.

A fundamental overhaul of the storage architecture was needed to provide 100% customer data security and high availability with no risk of data loss; increased flexibility for storage performance and capacity management, today and in the future, and better cost efficiency. NetEnt evaluated several storage solutions proposed by vendors like HP, IBM, HDS, NetApp, EMC and others. But what they failed to pin-point was a vendor who could bring one comprehensive solution that offered both future scalability and the flexibility to accommodate the diverse needs and sizes of different casino platforms.

With the hype around Software-defined storage just beginning to emerge, the hardware based approach seemed to NetEnt to be an increasingly restrictive, costly and inflexible solution. When NetEnt was introduced to DataCore at an industry event, they were able to learn more about its pure Software-defined Storage alternate approach. A detailed and rigorous proof of concept phase commenced to test, stretch and prove the stability, performance and functionality of SANsymphony-V. Anders details the journey to software defined within the NetEnt organisation: "Amongst all the well-known storage vendors, there was no real encompassing solution until we evaluated DataCore's SANsymphony-V software. DataCore's Software-defined Storage platform gives NetEnt all the storage flexibility, high availability, performance and functionality required and improves our overall data security with an adaptable design for future requirements, which is a key priority for us."

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