Project Name: High Speed High Availability (HSHA) Game Development Environment
Business Objective: Activision was the world\’s first independent video game publishers for console based systems. From its beginning in 1979, to today, Activision remains one of the largest and most successful video game publisher in the world. Activision needed a high speed, and high availability game development management system. The current system was not failing over fast enough, and was causing critical development downtime outages, impacting game release dates across multiple titles and teams.
Solution
Activision engaged Harmonic to identify the performance issues in its existing video game development platform, and to increase speed, fault tolerance, and failover capabilities as follows:
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- Harmonic assessed the current environment, platforms, and systems with Activision and interviewed some key game developers and IT management to gather details about faults and failures.
- After isolating a few key systems and areas, Harmonic provided a step by step methodical approach to isolating the troublesome performance areas, and corrected them one by one, system by system.
- Finally, in conjunction with its Microsoft Product Dev Team contacts, Harmonic worked with and implemented a second (unheard of) failover HA system for Activision\’s Microsoft SharePoint platform, which housed a lot of the game project management repositories, workflows, and systems the managers used to track daily video game progress across the large, dispersed teams.
- Harmonic found it to be a very interesting culture to interact with and work with the video game producers and developers, this was definitely not your typical corporate, government, or other organization.
- They worked very fast, at odd hours, and there were hundreds of developers on a single project. Harmonic provided a set of scripts to maintain the solution so that when we left, the IT department would be able to further identify, isolate, and defeat performance issues.
