OptaNet deliver core network at the world's largest Esports tournament

 

 

Dota 2 is a highly successful multiplayer online battle arena video game, developed by Valve, the American video game development and digital distribution company.

 

Between 3rd – 8th August 2015, The International Dota 2 Championships took place at the Key Arena in Seattle, with preliminary wildcard qualifications and seeding taking place at the nearby Westin Hotel. Teams from America, Europe, China and South East Asia looked to claim a share of the $18 million prize fund.

 

OptaNet were trusted to ensure gamers could compete and over 20 million fans could stream the live event from around the world. 400 cinemas across the US showed the tournament live and 10,000 fans paid $99 for a ticket for the live shows. 

 

 

Two 10Gb circuits were installed as primary and secondary lines, along with a third 1Gb wireless solution. The core was designed to keep the real time gamers on one 10Gb circuit with back-office and attendee traffic on a second 10Gb circuit. Failover configuration allowed the traffic to automatically fail over from Circuit 1 to Circuit 2 or vise versa in the event that both 10Gb circuits were to fail, then a truly diverse wirelessly delivered circuit would take over the essential traffic to ensure that the event had a successful outcome.

 

OptaNet provided all the core networking equipment including 10 Gigabit Cisco Nexus 3064 layer 3 switches and Cisco ASA security appliances. Complex security rules were deployed to mitigate against possible denial of service attacks. The network is deploy in an N+1 design ensuring that the network has no single point of failure.

 

An onsite Network Operations Centre (NOC) was staffed with high level engineers equipped with a supporting suite of tools to constantly poll devices for status and health so that they could respond and react to events before a situation became service impacting.

 

OptaNet CEO and Managing Director David Elliott commented “The popularity of video games as a spectator sport has grown significantly in the past three years. With over 15 years’ experience in the events and ISP industries, we are uniquely positioned to deliver stable, fast, secure and resilient solutions. This provides our clients with peace of mind, so they can focus their attention elsewhere.”