Through technological hocus-pocus Riaan Ferreira, Solution Architect at HP’s Networking Business division was able to divine some statistics about the network performance at rAge 2010.
HP Networking Business imported equipment valued at over R4 million, including 70 layer-2 switches. The CPU utilisation on the switches averaged at 5%, leaving plenty of overhead. This network linked into 12 Intel 6-core Xeon dedicated gaming servers, which included a patch server. The main link to the server (a 20GB fibre connection) peaked at around 33% utilisation.
Thanks to the advanced networking equipment and HP’s monitoring of the event, they were able to discern the amount of data shifted around the LAN during the 53 hour event. According to Ferreira, as of 13.00 on the final LAN day, upwards of 540TB had moved through their switches. This figure doesn’t include data transferred directly between individuals.
This means that on average, each of the 2 080 gamers in attendance transferred 260GB of data over the duration of the LAN, or roughly 4.90GB per hour. Whichever way you cut it, a weekend at rAge is probably a cheaper and faster way to transfer data than using current South African broadband pricing and speeds (additional LAN survival costs excluded).
There were ten uplink switches in place (these connect the backbone of the LAN), and the average gaming traffic through these to the dedicated servers was 4.2TB per uplink. Ferreira reckons that around 506TB of data was non-gaming related – attributed to file sharing across the LAN and through the dedicated DC++ server.
Ferreira commented that the HP Business Networking crew deemed the event a success. They will be analysing all of the networking data collected during the LAN to see what lessons can be learnt. As for future rAge LANs, the HP crew is keen to return and lend their expertise and equipment to a just gaming cause.
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