CASESTUDY
35
ADVANCED SWITCHING PROVIDES
RETAIL GAMING HAVEN
HMV’s state-of-the-art Gamerbase centres rely on the latest networking
technology to provide a haven for gamers and an unmatched marketing
opportunity
W
ith no less than 80 Quad Core PCs and unit (CPU) power for its own switching functions with a
Dual Core notebooks with multi-player threshold limiting capability.
large area network (LAN) and online play, Gamerbase managing director and gaming centre
the fi rst Gamerbase centre opened in HMV’s London veteran, Dominic Mulroy explained: “If a port goes down
We’ve never
Trocadero store boasting over 150 of the best games in a switch or if anything happens to the kit, the whole
had an issue
and offering a perfect venue for gamers to visit with network goes down. Whereas the PCs are like a cog
with the
their friends or use as a base to take on rivals over the in the wheel, the network is the wheel and if ever that
internet. breaks then none of the PCs are available for customers.”
equipment.
In specifying its technology infrastructure, Gamerbase The DGS-3427s also have three optional 10GB
That’s more
turned to D-Link and its xStack managed switches, stacking modules per switch. These can be used for future
important for
together with Dell XPS PCs and Razer peripherals to scalability if the Gamerbase network needs to grow
form the foundations for one of the most powerful further in the form of a fault tolerant star stack providing
us than anything
gaming centres in the world. 20GB of uplink per switch. These robust uplinks will free
else. If the
Andrew Mulholland, D-Link marketing manager up ports on the front of the switches and also provide
network goes
explained: “You do need a really robust switch for this resiliency for the slave and master switches allowing
kind of environment. If a switch overheats or doesn’t have almost seamless transition between the master switches
down, then our
enough memory, it will just fall over and come to a halt.” if one fails.
reputation goes
Gamerbase’s requirements included a robust Since the Gamerbase centre opened it has
down with it.
switching architecture, suffi cient memory to keep up with experienced 100% uptime. “We’ve never had an issue
the working environment and a fabric switching speed with the equipment,” said Mulroy. “That’s more important
that was fast enough to handle the demanding gaming for us than anything else. If the network goes down, then
servers. The most important thing Gamerbase was our reputation goes down with it. The key thing we are
looking for from the switches, however, was reliability. trying to push about Gamerbase is its fi rst-class gaming.”
The set-up used fi ve xStack DGS-3427 switches, The gaming centre veteran added: “We want to be
delivered performance, fl exibility, security, multi-layer the 21st century cyberclub, offering free membership,
Quality of Service (QoS) and a redundant power option with age verifi cation, which allows us to share stats with
to Gamerbase. Mulholland said: “We set up the DGS- games publishers.”
3427 D-Link switches providing dedicated Gigabit speed
to the desktop. One of the switches was positioned as
the master with all servers connected to it, which left us
with more ports on the slave switches for the gamers.”
However, even 1GB uplinks were not enough for the
demands of gamers for high bandwidth and low latency,
so D-Link used link aggregation to combine bandwidth
across multiple uplinks on Layer 2. This resulted in a total
of 16GB uplinks on the master switch and 4GB uplinks
on the slave switches.
“Using D-Link’s clever load balancing algorithms, traffi c
is fairly balanced along the uplinks to ease congestion,”
added Mulholland. “This means that if one slave switch
fails it will not affect the other switches. Also, with
D-Link’s unique “Safeguard Engine” not even an over
utilisation of bandwidth can cause the switch to stutter.”
If a network pushes too much traffi c through any
switch, it will ultimately freeze as the processor is not
left enough processing power to function. However,
Safeguard Engine saves a percentage of central processing
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010 RETAIL TECHNOLOGY
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