IBM Serves up Game Development Infrastructure

March 13, 2007: As consumers voraciously devour digital media, computer game studios are looking for ways to drive development even harder. To this end, IBM is teaming up with reseller Seven Group Digital Media to help game studies wring every drop of performance out of their development infrastructure harder and cut costs.

The two decided to join forces to jointly offer Seven Group's experience in games and animation studio design and IBM's portfolio of hardware and software to game developers looking for complete studio environments.

"Your typical games studio looks like a cool place to work - but don't be fooled, it isn't all fun and games. Studio infrastructure is one tough assignment for the studio CTO and his staff,” says Anthony Brown, Seven Group's managing director of business development.

“Game companies have to increase the efficiency of their development cycle to make their ship-date windows and are increasingly relying on third parties to handle routine tasks,” adds David Laux, IBM global executive, games and interactive entertainment. “While in the past developers tried to create their own tools, today they would prefer to focus on their core business of new artistic assets, new content and play enhancement.”

The two companies are pitching NAS 7G, a high performance Network Attached Storage system, as the solution games companies have been looking for. The solution combines IBM’s System Storage DS4000 series, IBM System x servers and Exanet's Exastore NAS software that have, according to IBM, been tailored to the needs of artists, graphics designers, programmers, and engineers in the studio environment.

The two claim that the solution scales with “virtually no limits” due to Exastore's clustering technology. Handy, considering the skyrocketing demands game development struggles under.

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