Case Study: How to build a Mansion - December 2006  

Launched in September 2004, Mansion (Gibraltar) Limited is a fully licensed gaming company headquartered in Gibraltar, writes Jo Adams from S&T. The company employs over 130 industry experts and member support staff. In 2006, Mansion signed a four-year £34m shirt sponsorship deal with English Premier League soccer side Tottenham Hotspur. Under the terms of the deal, Mansion will partner Spurs across a wide range of commercial activities including targeting of the Asian market and a co-branded internet gaming site that will operate on a revenue share basis.

Mansionpoker.net is a free play online poker site where players can hone their strategy and qualify for a seat and a chance to share in the $2m-plus prize pool on offer in the mansionpoker.net Poker Dome Challenge, a 43-week televised tournament series in Las Vegas. Mansionpoker.net has attracted over 200,000 registered players since launching in late May 2006.
“A highly resilient infrastructure is fundamental to the success and continued growth of our business – even the shortest outage of service would be damaging and result in players turning to our competitors’ online gaming environments,” said Grant Brett, head of IT at Mansion.

Outsourcing has been critical

Rather than build an in-house infrastructure solution that would require significant capital expenditure and take a considerable amount of time to set up, the company has instead opted to outsource its data centre requirements. There is a clear market trend for companies with high volume computing needs to outsource rather than overburdening internal resources with building and managing an IT infrastructure platform.
“Building our own data centre was never on the cards. It makes good business sense for us to seek out subject-matter experts who are better positioned to do this for us,” continued Brett
The decision to outsource was driven by several critical business demands.
1 - Availability. The growing popularity of online gaming has made it imperative that Mansionpoker.net is available to its customers around-the-clock across all time zones. Therefore, the infrastructure has to be built robustly with multiple fail over, resilience and redundancy. To replicate this effectively would be prohibitive.
2- Security. As an online gaming company, Mansion holds the personal details of all its players. To gain the trust of its users, the standards of governance and security, both physical and online, have to be at the same level as any financial institution. Again, to replicate this effectively would be prohibitive.
3 - Growth. As Mansion’s customer base has increased, its central IT footprint has grown steadily to cater for organic growth and an increasing global target market. Having a datacentre partner that can quickly react to the changing pace of these requirements and has scalability is essential for servicing market demand.
4 - Speed to market. Designing, building and deploying a highly redundant data centre may take over 12 months. As the market has seen explosive growth, it has been essential that the company be able to service the market today or risk loss of market share

The requirements

Based on these drivers, Mansion developed a list of requirements that were used to asses each potential partner. These requirements included:
1 - Carrier neutrality. Mansion required a connectivity solution that enabled them to utilise multiple carriers. This enabled them to maximise availability of their service while also ensuring minimum network latency.
2 - Enterprise class infrastructure. The ability of the data centre to provide multiple infrastructure redundancy (power and cooling) ensuring Mansion systems run 24/7/365 (N + 1).
3 - Scalability. A flexible solution that would allow for on-demand growth was a necessity. This had to allow Mansion to scale its infrastructure ensuring that the vendor had both the power capacity to provide over 6 KVA per rack and associated cooling in addition to actual physical space.
4 - Location. Mansion required a location that was accessible, and minimised network latency especially with the US and Asia.
5 - Proven reputation. The provider needed a proven track record in delivering and operating highly resilient high density blade server environments.
As part of the outsourcing project scope, Mansion had identified that Ireland provided the best European site to locate its IT infrastructure. Ireland offers ultra low network latency to Asia and North America ensuring Mansion’s global customers are playing each other in real-time. Mansion is one of a number of international gaming companies to have located its ICT infrastructure in Ireland, where it can make the most of technical benefits as well as the added value of working with a highly skilled workforce with an understanding of business needs.

Interxion Ireland

“Interxion Ireland was chosen as Mansion’s data centre partner because it met every one of our technical requirements and has the relevant experience, demonstrating early on in its engagement that they were willing to pull out all stops to ensure that we were up and running in a very short timeframe in order to meet our own internal deadlines,” Brett concluded.
Interxion Ireland hosts a number of high density computing environment deploying high density racks in shared and private areas. The Data Centre has been architected to provide up to 20 KVa per rack which is adequate to meet with the most demanding high density computing environments. Power and cooling infrastructure have also been built with excess capacity to ensure that Interxion can meet demand now and into the future.

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