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    Data Storage in Multiplayer Gaming

    Fans of online gaming brace for the official release of Path of Exile 2, one of the most highly anticipated multiplayer IPs in recent years, now available only in the early access version. As the game premiere approaches (well, we hope so), the demands on the developer’s – Grinding Gear Games – data storage infrastructure are immense. With millions of players connecting from all corners of the globe, ensuring steady performance and uninterrupted gameplay becomes a top priority. Multiplayer games like Path of Exile 2 generate vast amounts of data that must be processed, stored, and protected at all times. Even short downtime can lead to enormous consequences that game developers and publishers want to avoid at all costs. The critical data storage challenges faced by multiplayer games IPs can be avoided if appropriate solutions are used.

    So, let’s take a closer look at this huge market with its challenges and ways to solve them by enabling game developers to meet the growing demands of a global player base that continues to grow.

    Key Data Storage Challenges in Multiplayer Games

    Answering High Availability and Business Continuity Needs

    In online gaming, where players connect across different time zones, even brief periods of downtime can result in significant financial and reputational losses. Downtime discourages players from joining the community and the game itself, leading to a rapid loss of user trust, increased churn, and negative publicity, particularly during high-profile events such as game launches, esports tournaments, or seasonal updates.

    Without high availability, business continuity, and disaster recovery in multiplayer gaming, minor hardware failures or network issues can lead to painful downtime. During server failures or cyberattacks, critical data such as player progress, inventory, and in-game purchases may be permanently lost. Extended outages prevent gameplay and transactions, resulting in significant revenue loss and increased recovery costs. The damage extends to a game’s reputation, manifesting in negative reviews, social media backlash, and discouragement for existing and potential players. This situation can also create a competitive disadvantage as players migrate to games that provide a better overall experience.

    We can name a few examples of such unfortunate events:

    • 2012 League of Legends World Championships – the network failure caused most of the people watching to refresh their stream, causing own3d.tv and twitch.tv to crash as well.
    • Electronic Sports World Cup (ESWC) 2015: Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tournament – the event’s broadcast was disrupted due to server overheating caused by heatwaves in Montreal. Additionally, on the second day, the servers were targeted by DDoS attacks, further hindering the smooth progression of the tournament.

    No Place for Lags: Low Latency Requirements

    Gaming servers that can process data in real-time are vital for improving the multiplayer gaming experience by ensuring smooth gameplay for all players, especially in real-time interactions like Valorant or Rocket League, where fast response times enhance fairness in competitive matches. With professional events featuring huge prizes, sponsorships, and even Olympic medals at stake, the pressure is immense! These servers effectively manage large player bases through load balancing, as demonstrated in Apex Legends, where traffic is distributed to prevent crashes during peak events. Regional server adaptation optimizes performance to align with local preferences, such as mobile-first configurations in Asia compared to PC-focused setups in Western regions. In Counter-Strike or League of Legends (LoL), low latency and reliance on stable servers are crucial for fair competition to a vast community of players. Synchronization issues in World of Warcraft (WoW), where inconsistent server updates disrupted gameplay, significantly impacted the overall gaming experience.

    Differences in latency in inter-regional matches, such as PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), can lead to uneven gameplay, especially when high demand on servers at peak times or during live events reduces their performance. This affects real-time responsiveness, which is crucial for competitive gaming. Proper caching alleviates these problems. Storing frequently used data in memory for faster retrieval, complemented by the use of solid-state drives (SSDs) to reduce latency through faster read and write speeds. Moreover, NVMe storage further enhances performance by enabling higher data transfer speeds and lower latency through direct connections to the motherboard, providing smoother gameplay during high-demand scenarios.

    From Error 37 to Rubberbanding: Scalability in Online Gaming

    Scalability problems in multiplayer gaming significantly impact player experiences, game reputation, and revenue. Server overload during surges in player activity, such as new game launches or updates, leads to downtime or degraded performance, as seen during the World of Warcraft: Classic launch, frustrating players with long queues and disconnects. The release of Diablo 3 also serves as a notable example of scalability issues; Blizzard’s servers faced massive access requests at launch, resulting in “Error 37” messages that made the game unavailable to many players. The company had to quickly deploy additional servers to accommodate the unexpected influx of players, highlighting the critical need for scalable infrastructure during significant releases.

    Poor scalability also results in increased latency during peak times, disrupting gameplay with lag or “rubberbanding,” exemplified by PUBG, which struggled with severe lag when its player base rapidly grew. Unequal experiences across regions occur when infrastructure fails to support global demand, with games like Valorant initially offering inconsistent performance in underserved areas. Scalability challenges can also delay updates and matchmaking, as seen with Apex Legends during seasonal updates, leaving players stuck in queues. Lastly, scalability limits can restrict a game’s ability to accommodate growing audiences, as evidenced by Among Us, which struggled with server stability during its peak popularity, missing opportunities to retain and expand its user base.

    Protecting Gaming Data

    Security issues in the multiplayer gaming sector pose severe risks, especially when cybercriminals target companies with ransomware attacks. These incidents can disrupt gameplay, compromise user data, and damage a company’s reputation.

    In 2020, Capcom suffered an attack where hackers stole personal data from employees and customers disrupting the development of major gaming titles. Similarly, during the 2021 Apex Legends Global Series tournament, hackers targeted the event’s servers with a coordinated ransomware attack, causing significant downtime and ruining the player experience.

    Ransomware attacks often start with phishing campaigns, where players or employees are tricked into opening malicious links or files, allowing hackers to infiltrate systems. Once inside, the attackers encrypt critical data, holding it hostage until a ransom is paid. These incidents not only disrupt gaming operations but also lead to data breaches, exposing sensitive information such as login credentials, payment data, and personal details.

    In addition, account takeovers allow hackers to gain unauthorized access to player accounts, often leading to the theft of in-game resources and virtual currency. It’s important to note that these transactions are not just virtual; account subscriptions, access to downloadable content (DLC), new seasons, or transactions in sports games such as the FIFA Ultimate Team (FUT). These transactions require adequate security measures and compliance with regulations related to trading funds in various financial markets.

    Efficient Data Management and Analysis

    Big data analytics is vital in modern multiplayer games, enabling developers to process vast gameplay data and enhance player satisfaction. Games like Clash of Clans and League of Legends generate billions of records on user behavior, such as login times and in-game purchases, which are analyzed using real-time analytics and machine learning to optimize matchmaking, reduce churn, and adjust gameplay difficulty dynamically. Data-driven decisions influence game balance, content updates, and promotional events, ensuring continued engagement through periodic updates, limited-time rewards, and strategic seasons. Regular balancing updates address character or skill dominance based on win rates and player feedback, though such changes can spark mixed reactions. Sentiment analysis tools help gauge community responses, while automated systems for managing player behavior reports ensure penalties are fair, considering context to uphold community standards.

    These activities require robust data storage systems capable of handling terabytes of data daily, with scalable solutions ensuring real-time analysis and long-term data archiving to support ongoing improvements and player satisfaction.

    To manage the intense data storage demands of multiplayer games, a combination of advanced hardware and effective caching methods is essential. High-performance storage solutions, such as NVMe SSDs, are pivotal due to their ultra-fast read/write speeds and low latency, enabling real-time data processing for matchmaking, gameplay analytics, and player behavior monitoring. Additionally, integrating enterprise-grade storage arrays, including hybrid systems with SSDs and HDDs, provides scalable capacity and consistent performance under heavy workloads.

    Caching methods further optimize data access and reduce latency. With systems like Open-E JovianDSS, caching can be implemented through technologies such as read-cache and write-log (ZFS Intent Log or ZIL). The read-cache, often backed by SSDs, stores frequently accessed data, reducing the need to retrieve it from slower storage layers. The write-log ensures secure and fast writes by buffering data before it is committed to disk, enhancing performance during high-demand scenarios such as live events or peak gaming hours.

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    Pause Is Not an Option: Ensuring 24/7 Gameplay

    Open-E JovianDSS High Availability Clusters for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

    Open-E JovianDSS High Availability (HA) clusters provide a robust solution for ensuring Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery in online gaming, where even brief periods of downtime can lead to significant financial and reputational losses.

    Open-E JovianDSS, with its safety-critical design and built-in redundancy, ensures that essential game data — such as player progress, inventory, and in-game transactions — remains accessible even during hardware failures, network issues, or cyberattacks. By utilizing active-active and active-passive HA clusters, Open-E guarantees constant availability of game services, minimizing disruptions during peak gaming periods, such as game launches, esports tournaments, or seasonal updates. If a failure occurs, automatic failover processes immediately move workloads to functioning nodes within the cluster, preventing downtime that could frustrate players and harm the game’s reputation.

    For Disaster Recovery, Open-E provides asynchronous replication from on-site to off-site locations (On- & Off-site Data Protection feature), allowing critical game data to be mirrored and quickly restored during catastrophic failures, such as server overheating (or other physical damage) or DDoS attacks. Gaming services should be able to resume swiftly, with no data loss or extended outages, which are key to maintaining player trust and engagement.

    Advanced Caching Mechanisms

    Open-E JovianDSS employs various caching techniques to ensure a seamless and responsive gaming experience. Read Cache improves read performance by storing frequently accessed or recently used data in faster memory media, reducing latency and providing quick access to critical game data, such as player stats and in-game purchases.

    Similarly, Write Log caching optimizes write operations using a separate SSD or NVMe device (SLOG). Such an approach speeds up write operations and enhances data reliability by protecting against data loss in the event of a sudden power failure, ensuring that player progress and transactions are safely recorded.

    In addition, ZFS Special Devices are employed to manage metadata and small files separately from the main storage devices. This reduces the load on primary storage, enhancing overall performance and reducing latency, which is vital during peak gaming periods when large volumes of data are generated.

    These features enable optimized performance and reliable service, ensuring smooth gameplay and continuous player engagement, essential for maintaining satisfaction and long-term success in the competitive online gaming world.

    Scalability and Flexibility

    Open-E JovianDSS offers robust scalability and flexibility, making it an ideal data storage solution for online gaming environments that must scale rapidly as player demand increases. Gaming communities grow, and the volume of in-game data expands. Hence, seamlessly scaling data storage is crucial to maintaining high performance and ensuring that critical game data remains accessible without disruption.

    Open-E JovianDSS supports scalability by expanding seamless storage capacity as player demand increases, allowing gaming companies to add additional data storage capacities without interrupting gameplay. They ensure that, as the number of players grows or during high-traffic events such as game launches or esports tournaments, the infrastructure can accommodate increased capacity requirements without sacrificing performance or user experience.

    Open-E JovianDSS also provides flexibility through its support for various storage environments. The platform integrates smoothly with SAN (iSCSI, Fiber Channel) and NAS (NFS, SMB) protocols, enabling it to fit into various existing infrastructure setups. Flexibility ensures that gaming companies can choose the storage solution that best fits their needs, whether they require block-level storage for high-performance operations or file-based storage for handling large volumes of game data and player files.

    Flexibility is crucial for gaming companies also in terms of the data storage devices that can be used. HDDs are ideal for cost-effective, high-capacity storage, such as archiving game logs and backups, while SSDs and NVMe drives provide the high-speed performance needed for real-time gameplay, matchmaking, and live streaming. NVMe drives, in particular, excel in scenarios requiring ultra-fast data access, like real-time analytics and dynamic in-game interactions. This kind of flexibility allows gaming companies to create hybrid systems, using SSDs for performance-critical tasks and HDDs for bulk storage. Hardware agnosticism enhances this setup by allowing companies to select and integrate storage solutions from different vendors or technologies, ensuring they aren’t restricted by specific hardware or systems. This approach gives businesses the freedom to choose the most suitable storage hardware for each use case—whether it’s SSDs, HDDs, or NVMe—without worrying about compatibility issues.

    By combining scalability with flexible data storage integration, Open-E JovianDSS allows online gaming entities to efficiently manage increasing data requirements while ensuring high availability and optimal performance.

    Data Security and Ransomware Protection

    Open-E JovianDSS uses immutable snapshots to create copies of game data, making it resistant to ransomware attacks. These snapshots can be restored if an attack occurs, minimizing data loss and downtime.

    The system also utilizes snapshots and retention plans for regular backups, ensuring that multiple copies of game data are securely stored across different locations. Scrubbing and self-healing features automatically detect and repair data integrity issues, maintaining data availability and consistency.

    To further enhance security, Open-E JovianDSS supports SEDs (self-encrypting disks), which encrypt data at the hardware level, protecting sensitive information from unauthorized access. These features provide comprehensive protection against data loss, cyberattacks, and unauthorized access, ensuring a secure and seamless gaming experience.

    Efficient Data Management with ZFS

    With ZFS features like deduplication and compression, Open-E JovianDSS saves storage space, particularly for large game files and frequent updates. You can eliminate duplicate data and compress files to maximize data storage efficiency, reducing infrastructure costs while ensuring high performance – such as needed in online gaming. These features help maintain low latency and high throughput, ensuring a smooth gaming experience even as data demands grow.

    Securing Multiplayer Gaming: The Critical Role of Robust Data Storage Solutions

    Multiplayer gaming has become one of the most profitable sectors within the media and entertainment industry, generating revenue through in-game microtransactions, international esports, and globally hosted online tournaments. However, the vast scale of multiplayer gaming presents significant challenges, particularly in maintaining the infrastructure needed to support millions of players simultaneously. The competition in this market is fierce, and even minor setbacks, such as server downtime or data loss, can result in substantial reputational and financial damage.

    A robust and reliable data storage solution is at the heart of a successful multiplayer gaming operation. Open-E JovianDSS is designed to meet these demands, providing unparalleled scalability, security, and performance for the multiplayer gaming industry and the broader media and entertainment market. To learn more about how Open-E JovianDSS excels in this demanding environment, explore our guide for a detailed breakdown of its capabilities and advantages.

    If you want to know more about data storage in the media and entertainment industry – explore our “Art of Data Storage” guide! In this brochure, you’ll find all the insights you need to optimize your data storage infrastructure and ensure seamless performance at every step — from managing real-time data to supporting creative updates, player engagement and more.

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