GameFly Streaming

Business challenge

Envisioning an innovative streaming solution for gamers around the world, GameFly Streaming needed to team with a cloud provider offering powerful technology to bring its service to market.

Transformation

GameFly chose an IBM Cloud solution based on the platform’s performance, flexibility and global presence. The business hosts workloads on IBM Cloud bare metal server infrastructure in 12 IBM Cloud data centers.

Results

Business challenge story

Seeking high-performance infrastructure for a gaming innovation

Throughout recent shifts in the consumption model for entertainment media, gaming has lagged slightly behind audio and video. “As the internet matured and bandwidth increased, people started to download music and video files, and shortly after, began to stream them,” explains Elad Dror, Senior Vice President at GameFly. “Gaming is much more complex, and although people are downloading games now, they typically still need to run the files on their game consoles or high-end PCs.”

Envisioning an innovative streaming service that would uncouple gaming from the customary hardware, GameFly needed to team with a global cloud provider to bring its offering to market. “We had to find the right cloud partner to enable us to configure servers to our specific requirements and host them in data centers wherever our users are,” says Dror. “We need to be close to our users to ensure an average of sub-35 milliseconds of latency in our delivery.”

Transformation story

Powering a global streaming service with bare metal servers

With data center locations worldwide, high-performance bare metal servers and flexible configuration options, the IBM Cloud platform provided the powerful hosting solution GameFly required for its streaming service. “Not many cloud providers offer servers with GPU [graphics processing unit] technology,” says Dror. “It was great for us to discover that we can build servers with GPU in IBM facilities around the world.”

Hosting workloads on IBM Cloud bare metal server infrastructure in 12 IBM Cloud data centers, GameFly anticipates extending its offering widely beyond its primary customer base in North America and Europe. “I can click a button and build as many servers as I need to in a given area,” says Dror. “With IBM Cloud, we can have our streaming service in a new market in a matter of days.”

Results story

Delivering an exceptional experience for gamers worldwide

The global IBM Cloud hosting platform supports GameFly in minimizing latency and providing an exceptional user experience for gamers worldwide. “The locations of the IBM Cloud data centers allow us to get close to users and offer sufficient network round trip delay,” says Dror. “I’m happy to say we’ve managed to achieve an average network latency of 25 milliseconds in the US and 32 milliseconds in Europe.”

Plus, the IBM Cloud technology offers the critical flexibility GameFly needs to deliver its service. “We have a unique technology solution, and we can’t use just any cloud provider,” says Dror. “I need to build my own servers, and that’s what IBM is enabling me to do—build to the exact specifications that fit my service.”

Finally, GameFly easily accommodates fluctuating workloads and manages costs with the IBM Cloud hosting solution. “If we built traditional servers and found out later that we didn’t need the capacity, we would be wasting a lot of money,” says Dror. “With IBM Cloud, we have the flexibility to build servers and cancel them as we need to in all different areas.”

About GameFly Streaming

Based in Los Angeles, California, GameFly offers a high-end video game streaming service, providing users with a next-generation, console-like experience. The business teams with Samsung, LG, Philips, Amazon and selected telecommunications companies to serve more than 30 countries worldwide.
 

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