With over 15 million active users on Facebook alone, Digital Chocolate’s games keep their infrastructure very busy. Which is why Digital Chocolate has deployed Xsigo to support at portion of that traffic.

Founded by video game pioneer Trip Hawkins (he also founded EA), Digital Chocolate boasts some hot titles including Millionaire City, MMA Pro Fighter, Rollercoaster Rush, and Tower Bloxx.

Their data center architecture is built in a cloud architecture to support the development and production of these highly popular games.

In their private cloud, they now use Xsigo to help accelerate processes and get more from their servers.

According to their team, they gained three important benefits with Xsigo:

• Performance: MySQL servers can now support 35% more requests per second than before
• Fast management: Virtual machine migrations now take from two to ten seconds, verses as much as 30 minutes with 1G Ethernet
• Agility: I/O configuration changes can be completed in seconds without having to touch the servers

The latter point is significant for them.  Development and production networks are kept physically isolated in their environment (which also includes VMware ESX 4.0, Dell servers, and Compellent storage). With virtual I/O, they can move a server from one to the other in seconds, entirely in software, without sacrificing any of the isolation that separate networks provide. That can be a real time saver when putting new code into production.

The team at Digital Chocolate was initially interested in virtual I/O for the cost savings: fewer cards, cables and switch ports. What they quickly found, though, is that the operational benefits can be a lot of fun, too!