Gcore selects Arista to power the next generation of high-performance content distribution network services with reduced cost while offering capacity for growth

Highlights

Challenge

With the rapid growth of its content distribution service, Gcore was starting to reach the price versus performance limits of its legacy network technology and looked to Arista as a path towards cost savings and sustained growth.

Solutions

• Arista 7280 Series Switches
• Arista 7050 & 7010 Series Switches
• Arista EOS®

Results

• Cost-effective migration to 100GE core network
• Major increase in port density with decrease in maintenance and support costs
• Planned migration away from MPLS to reduce additional WAN costs
• Fast and responsive technical support with a credible long-term product roadmap

Gcore have been recognized as a pioneer in delivering high-performance content distribution networks at a price point that is one of the lowest within the industry. With increased demand and planned regional growth, Gcore turned to Arista Networks technology for a major migration and upgrade project that delivered significant capital and operational cost savings while providing a viable route to meet its expansion plans.

Project background

Having a team of highly skilled professionals with many years of experience in IT, including game development, Gcore revels in pushing the envelope in terms of performance and scale when it comes to content distribution networks (CDNs).

Since 2011, the company has grown rapidly, establishing point-of-presence locations across 5 continents. In 2013, the firm was awarded the world record by the Guinness Book of Records for the “Most Players Online Simultaneously on one MOG Server”. A record they then beat, in 2014, when the Gcore network served up 1,114,000 online gamers simultaneously.

Challenge

With increased demand from new territories and a great deal of interest from the gaming industry, Gcore began another round of business engineering in 2014.

The equipment we used previously did not provide the performance we aimed for at and it was not cost-efficient.

Solution

Following an extensive evaluation of competitive options, Jens Osterloh and his technical team decided on an upgrade that would move key locations and all new deployments onto Arista Networks switches.

In the smaller deployments, Gcore was able to use a pair of Arista 7280 switches to replace at least 4 legacy switch devices, including high-end routers.

In terms of deployment, the move to Arista has prompted a change in architecture, which is offering additional advantages.

The move has allowed Gcore to increase overall capacity but also simplify its network. “We were able to change our standard datacenter design to (almost) 10GE only, which increases capacity and reduces network costs per server,” says Jens. “On the Internet edge, we were able to upgrade from multiple-10GE to 100GE, which reduces costs for cross-connects and provides us with a big reserve of bandwidth capacity for future growth.”

With the next generation of online games boasting potentially hundreds of thousands of simultaneous players, this room to grow is “…extremely important for the high-bandwidth CDN and streaming business and especially beneficial for our new video platform,” adds Mr. Osterloh.

With 44 global locations and growth on almost a monthly basis, the upgrade to Arista is still ongoing. “We are going to upgrade all remaining locations to Arista-only,” says Jens, “We are also considering the use of newer features like EVPN for global connectivity, which will allow us to replace our current MPLS implementation.”

Within the original criteria of performance, reliability, and price, Jens believes the upgrade has achieved its goal. “With Arista, we have gained significant improvements in CapEx and OpEx through lower service and maintenance costs while reliability has been faultless!”

Alongside the hardware cost and performance benefits, Jens Osterloh also flags up positives in dealing with the Arista support teams.