Innova builds a cost-efficient, scalable data center and reduces operational complexities with Netris.

Overview

Innova is an IT company that creates web services, publishes computer and mobile games, and develops 4game – a gaming platform and news portal with over 25 million active users. Innova is the official publisher of popular MMORPG games such as Lineage, Aion, Blade and Soul, Point Blank, Kingdom Under Fire, and more.

The main requirements for the new data center infrastructure were:

• To have a reliable network that delivers high-quality entertainment while preventing network outages, which can strongly affect Innova’s user experience and, ultimately, its success. 
• To reduce operational complexities and adopt a network approach that is easy to scale and manage.
• To replicate and scale its infrastructure while saving money and time and avoiding hardware lock-in. Agile and low-cost scaling is the key for such a fast-growing company to expand its footprint and host game servers throughout the world.
• To spend less time on troubleshooting and network change/ticket implementation and focus on business development.

Solution

• Operations: Innova’s engineers use Netris GUI for daily operations, not just network engineers but also OPS and DevOps teams. RestAPI is also being used for integration with internal DevOps and SecOps pipelines.
• Monitoring. Netris continuously monitors the health of the network and either apply software remediation or informs Innova of necessary actions if human intervention is required. There’s no need to configure monitoring.
• Switches. For highly available and highly performant switching Innova has deployed a Layer-3 leaf-spine topology using Edge-Core OCP switches.
• Security. Innova is using Netris ACL management workflows and orchestration as an additional layer of security that is enforced in hardware. 
• Routing on Host. Innova is actively using Netris ROH (Routing on Host) technology to achieve the server and IP address mobility, fast failover, and highest utilization of the network links. 
• L3 load balancing. Netris provides L3 anycast load balancing, which is using hashing functionality that exists in the network switches. Netris agent running the switches has a built-in health-check capability that works in concert with the L3 anycast load balancer to re-route the traffic based on application availability. Innova is mainly using L3 anycast for server load balancing of high bandwidth services, such as application download servers and video streamers.
• Support. Netris provides 24/7/365 technical support for the entire network stack, including open-source and commercial components. 

Comparison

“Netris has entirely transformed our network operations such that the network is now a service that other teams consume. We have obtained cloud UX and significantly improved agility.” said Raf Soghomonyan, CTO, Innova