Virtual World Ups Sales 200 Percent, Cuts Costs with Virtualization, New Database
Selby Evans
Microsoft promotes a product and tells about the the progress of reaction grid.
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ReactionGrid is a virtual world that offers a safe, online environment
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The company founders launched the site using a single server and an open-source database program but quickly realized that they needed more performance and scalability.
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ReactionGrid migrated operations to Windows Server® 2008 with Hyper-V™ technology to take advantage of server virtualization efficiencies, and also adopted Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008. As a result, ReactionGrid can grow faster by deploying virtual machines rather than physical servers, and cut its first-year hardware costs by U.S.$750,000. Because outstanding performance and reliability now provide a compelling user experience, ReactionGrid saw a 200 percent jump in sales.
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Virtualization Slows Server Growth
Even though the ReactionGrid site was not publicly announced, virtual-world enthusiasts soon discovered it, and traffic began to grow. As the number of customers grew, ReactionGrid watched its server costs skyrocket. ReactionGrid makes money primarily by selling sim packages—various Web server and storage configurations needed to create and store sims in the ReactionGrid environment. The more customers the site attracted and the more those customers enhanced their sims, the more host servers ReactionGrid needed to purchase and manage.
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Benefits
ReactionGrid is the first OpenSim-based virtual-world company to use Microsoft-based server virtualization to run nearly its entire infrastructure.
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Virtualization Speeds Business Growth
Although it takes a week or longer to deploy a sim in a physical-server infrastructure, it takes the ReactionGrid staff less than an hour to deploy one on a virtual machine.
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Virtualization Contains Hardware Costs
With the efficiencies provided by Hyper-V, ReactionGrid has been able to dramatically trim its hardware needs. Hyper-V actually changed the company’s business model and gave ReactionGrid much greater flexibility and economies of scale. “Two months after opening ReactionGrid to the public, we went from 200 to over 700 users,”
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1 comment:
Isn't this just an advertising pitch for Microsoft Server 2008.
I've read the article and am puzzled by "I had calculated that we would need 250 servers in 2009, but now we will need fewer than 100 because of the server consolidation efficiencies provided by Hyper-V". Even now ReactionGrid only has 141 regions - who needs 250 servers to run that many regions and 700 users?!
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