Case Study: IGN
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"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
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.
About IGN
From its corporate headquarters in San Francisco and offices throughout North America, Europe and Australia, IGN Entertainment has become a leading Internet media and services provider focused on the video game and entertainment enthusiast markets.
www.ign.com
About Opscode
Opscode is the leader in cloud infrastructure automation. We help companies of all sizes develop fully automated server infrastructures that scale easily and predictably; can be quickly rebuilt in any environment, and save developers and systems engineers time and money.
Our team is comprised of web infrastructure experts responsible for building and operating some of the world's largest websites and cloud computing platforms. Opscode is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, USA.
