IGN Leverages Opscode to Consolidate and Automate Datacenters

SEATTLE, July 19, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Opscode, Inc., the leader in cloud infrastructure automation, today announced that IGN, an Internet media and services provider focused on gaming and entertainment, is successfully using Hosted Chef from Opscode to integrate datacenters and automate and virtualize the company's infrastructure. The solution saves IGN precious man-hours and increases customer access.

IGN Entertainment, a business unit of News Corporation, is experiencing tremendous growth. With its main headquarters in San Francisco and offices throughout North America, Europe and Australia, IGN's properties reach more than 70 million unique users worldwide. Because of the company's significant growth, IGN was planning data consolidation and migration to a single, large scale datacenter in Las Vegas. IGN was faced with challenges including the immediate need for better configuration management, and requirement to rapidly virtualize that hardware into a virtual configuration.

"Immediately we were able to see a lot of success with Hosted Chef. For our datacenter move, we faced the challenge of transitioning from an extremely heterogeneous physical infrastructure to highly virtualized environment. Utilizing Chef to standardize the way we build our systems, and to rely on Hosted Chef as a managed solution, allowed us to quickly focus on doing things in an idempotent fashion," said Ryan Creasey, Principal Systems Engineer for IGN. "We're now able to focus more on doing things better and more efficiently, rather than the constant interrupt-driven incident mitigation."

IGN deployed Hosted Chef by Opscode and has experienced significant success because it is implemented using Ruby DSL, which allowed better integration of both centers, superior configuration management, OS flexibility, and easier virtualization and automation. Hosted Chef is the world's first and only hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for automated infrastructure configuration and management, and allows Chef to take dynamic, infrastructure centric actions across any portion of the environment. By leveraging Hosted Chef, IGN was able to significantly reduce man-hours spent on infrastructure maintenance tasks, increase the ability to add new nodes in minutes to keep up with peaks in web traffic and achieve a fully-automated, virtualized infrastructure.

Overall, deploying Hosted Chef alleviates unnecessary complexity and significantly reduces man-hours for maintenance and scalability. "I shudder to think how long it would have taken to migrate if we didn't have a systems automation framework," concludes Creasey. "We did it quickly with Chef, and saved a lot of time and man-hours in the process."

With Opscode, IGN was able to streamline its datacenter and offer quicker access to information. When the need arises to add web servers to the pool to meet customer demand, it can be accomplished via hands-off automation. Based on the success of implementing Hosted Chef, IGN plans to leverage Hosted Chef to consolidate its Santa Clara, Linux-based datacenter.

"We're thrilled to see the results IGN is experiencing. Consolidating datacenters can present significant challenges in configuration management, but the result is a streamlined process, saving significant time and money," said Adam Jacob, chief product officer for Opscode.

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. Opscode's 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. More information can be found at http://www.opscode.com.

About IGN Entertainment

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.

For additional information, contact:
Monica Rodriguez
[email protected]
(206) 282-4923 ext. 125

SOURCE Opscode, Inc.