Joyent Cloud Supports Social and Mobile Gaming Evolution

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - Jan 30, 2013) - Joyent, the high-performance cloud infrastructure company, today released new metrics that highlight its continued dominance in the world of mobile and social gaming. Built for performance, reliability and real-time elastic scaling, Joyent is the only provider able to meet the demands of today's modern gaming providers. New case studies from Digital Chocolate, Mob Science and Sleepy Giant showcase how gaming companies can improve the gamer experience, while dramatically reducing cost per daily active user (DAU) by capitalizing on Joyent's performance-based infrastructure.

Modern gaming on mobile and social platforms brings with it a certain amount of uncertainty. A moderately successful game on Facebook can draw several thousand DAUs, while a hit could ramp up from thousands to millions of DAUs in a matter of days, making it difficult for companies to anticipate or manage such unpredictable user and data intensive workloads. Joyent's highly elastic cloud infrastructure is built to accommodate unpredictable traffic bursts in a way that other cloud infrastructures can't, allowing companies to scale dynamically based on the needs of their business instead of having to overprovision servers by up to 50 percent in anticipation of success. This helps social gaming companies keep cost per DAU down, ultimately making games profitable.

Unlike traditional hardware-virtualized cloud computing infrastructure, which address application performance issues simply by asking customers to spend more on servers in anticipation of demand, Joyent's cloud-native architecture was built from the ground up with performance and application scaling in mind. The Joyent architecture virtualizes machines at the operating system level to manage compute, storage and networking resources in secure SmartOS zones. OS-based virtualization is orders of magnitude more cost effective and higher performing than hardware-based virtualization methods. In addition, these zones uniquely enable instant CPU bursting to smoothly handle spikes in demand. This eliminates the need to over-provision and overpay for virtual machines to accommodate unpredictable spikes in demand.

Though options exist from other cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, Joyent offers a competitive advantage for today's mobile and social gaming companies. This helps them meet even the most rigorous demands while also achieving cost savings, performance increases and enhanced support options. Results from leveraging the Joyent Cloud include:

• Cost savings. Infrastructure costs can often mean the difference between profit or loss for modern gaming companies. In line with the Joyent's commitment to standardize the tools necessary for successful social gaming, the company offers 20TB of monthly bandwidth, CPU bursting and disk I/O caching as inherent parts of its service, for free. As a result, gaming companies leveraging the cloud experience significant cost savings. "The very nature of our business makes our infrastructure needs unpredictable. With new players discovering us every day and the user base for our games changing constantly, it's imperative for us to have near instant scalability at a cost that's not crippling our bottom line," said Jason Loia, COO at Digital Chocolate. "Joyent is the only cloud provider that allows us to accommodate sudden bursts in bandwidth usage without driving up costs. It has helped us improve overall gameplay even as we cut our infrastructure costs by 50 percent, greatly improving our operating margins."
• Performance. The reality of the gaming industry is that speed matters. Companies need high-level performance from their cloud infrastructure, and Joyent delivers with top-notch hardware (all Nehalem/Westmere Xeon processors) and in-memory caching for 15x faster I/O. "Gamers are very fickle on Facebook, so there's intense competition within the world of social and mobile gaming and if you don't have fast performance from your game, the user is just one click away from other entertainment," said Michael Witz, founder and CEO of Mob Science. "To stave off the competition, it's critical that we get fast load times, our games are always available and we can immediately scale up our infrastructure when a game becomes a hit. Our game Snowball Fight went from a few hundred thousand DAUs to six million in a month -- and eventually hitting 27 million. The only reason our business survived is because we rely on Joyent."
• Support. Quickly getting answers to questions and help with technical issues is crucial for social gaming companies running in the cloud. Slogging through page after page of FAQs simply won't cut it, which is why Joyent continually introduces new and improved ways of solving problems. "We provide gaming companies with the tools and expertise to design, launch, operate and grow their digital entertainment platforms, so working with a team that can provide customized solutions and proven options that meet the needs of our ambitious and diverse projects is imperative," said Jamie Ortiz, Vice President, Strategic Growth at Sleepy Giant. "No matter what the issue, Joyent comes through with up-to-date knowledge and insight into the most advanced technology on the market. Whether the solution is one of its own offerings or one from a third party vendor that compliments its offerings, we know that help is just a phone call away."

"Modern gaming companies that leverage social and mobile platforms cannot operate without an enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure that can handle huge spikes in usage without lag or downtime," said Jason Hoffman, CTO, Joyent. "Joyent is built from the ground up to handle the most challenging performance and cloud uptime demands. And because we're built from the start as a cloud-native architecture, gaming companies especially don't have to worry about the costs associated with high performance."

Find out more about how Joyent is helping gaming companies meet the dynamic demands of their businesses in real-time here.

About Joyent:

Joyent is the high-performance cloud infrastructure company offering enterprises and developers the best public, and hybrid cloud infrastructure for today's demanding real-time web and mobile applications. Joyent delivers public cloud services to some of the most innovative companies in the world, including LinkedIn, Major League Baseball and Voxer. Node.js, the open source server-side JavaScript project developed and sponsored by Joyent, provides developers and enterprises such as Comcast Labs, Microsoft and Wal-Mart with the most powerful runtime for developing data-intensive, real-time apps. For more information visit http://www.joyent.com.