IGN

There is no such thing as too many power-ups. Or too much capacity.

Opscode + IGN take virtual environments to the next level. Consolidating Datacenters Reveals Major Need for Efficient, Automated Management of Platform Configurations and Scalability.

The Challenge

IGN is a leading Internet media and services provider focused on the video game and entertainment enthusiast markets. Collectively, IGN's properties reach more than 70 million unique users worldwide (February 2011, comScore). Its network of video game-related properties (IGN.com, 1Up. com, GameSpy, FilePlanet, TeamXbox and others) is one of the web's leading video game information destinations; IGN also owns and operates leading men's lifestyle site, AskMen, and entertainment site, UGO.com. With an imminent data consolidation and migration to a single, large scale datacenter in Las Vegas on the horizon, IGN was faced with challenges including the immediate need for better configuration management, and the requirement to rapidly virtualize that hardware into a virtual configuration.

The Solution

After considering several other industry solutions, IGN deployed their datacenter with Chef and Hosted Chef. The company has experienced significant success with Chef and Hosted Chef because it is implemented using a Ruby DSL, which allowed better integration of both centers, superior configuration management, OS flexibility, and easier virtualization and automation.

The Results

  • Significantly reduced man-hours spent on infrastructure maintenance tasks.
  • Increased ability to add new nodes in minutes to keep up with peaks in web traffic.
  • Achieved a fully-automated, virtualized infrastructure.
"Immediately we were able to see a lot of success with Chef and Hosted Chef. For our datacenter move, we faced the challenge of transitioning from an extremely heterogeneous physical infrastructure to a highly virtualized environment. Now, we spend more time on innovation. We can spend time thinking about how to do things better and more efficiently, with less time spent on interrupt-driven incident mitigation." Ryan Creasey, Principal Systems Engineer

IGN Entertainment is the leading Internet media and services provider focused on the video game and entertainment enthusiast markets. Collectively, IGN's properties reached more than 70 million unique users worldwide in February 2011, according to Internet audience measurement firm comScore. IGN's network of video game-related properties (IGN.com, 1UP.com, GameSpy, FilePlanet, TeamXbox and others) is the Web's #1 video game information destination. IGN also owns the world's largest men's lifestyle website, AskMen.com, and men's entertainment site UGO.com. It also provides technology for online game play in video games. IGN is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, with offices across North America, Europe and Australia.

Learn more about IGN

About Opscode

Opscode is the provider of Chef, the automation platform for the coded business. Opscode Chef provides the speed, flexibility, and efficiency to compete in the digital economy. By modeling IT infrastructure and application delivery as code, Chef empowers businesses of all sizes to easily scale to meet demand, eliminate down time, manage complexity, and accelerate time to market.