Why Online Gambling is a Private Cloud Early Adopter

Article Written by Mario Blandini, VP Product Marketing, SwiftStack

As the global online gambling market is expected to see a compound annual growth rate of nearly 11 percent between now and 2020 (Technavio), the amount of data associated with online gambling is also rapidly rising, entering the world of mind-boggling numbers.

This is an immediate problem for data-intensive companies like bet365 and others in the media and entertainment, life sciences and financial services industries. As data continues to grow worldwide in all facets of life and industry, organization as a whole are looking to these fast-moving companies as examples of how to solve their own data growth challenges.

Going back to bet365, the world’s largest online gambling company, let’s take a look at how they’re addressing their massive data growth with a transition to object storage and private cloud. bet365 has proven that object storage in the form of an on-premises cloud is an effective way to not only help them reduce complexity and cost, but also to allow them to have greater access to and control of its varied data sets. 

As James Nightingale, Principal Systems Architect at bet365, states, “As our data footprint continues to grow on a massive scale, it’s becoming more challenging to store, access and manage. We currently have over 3 petabytes of block storage on SAN and NAS systems. It’s an expensive way of doing things and challenging to scale.”

bet365 choose SwiftStack as its object storage platform; “We looked at a few alternatives but felt that SwiftStack’s laser focus on object storage best suited our needs. By adding more functionality or by including object storage in existing solutions, other vendors had made their products less effective and overcomplicated,” said Nightingale. SwiftStack’s private cloud architecture has also allowed bet365 to expand this data layer across multiple sites and regions without significant complexity and cost burdens of enterprise storage. As a result, the company is already looking to scale its object storage platform out to other core data centers as well.

Furthermore, implementing object storage is enabling bet365 to leverage the cost efficiencies of commodity hardware and open source software. “Our new solution means we no longer need to use enterprise grade servers and software. This is the first time that bet365 will host a production system on commodity hardware with open source load balancer technology,” said Nightingale.

Traditionally, in addition to its SAN and NAS systems, bet365 has written a large quantity of its data to tape, and stored it offsite. The challenge then became accessing the data. Now bet365’s data can be stored online where it can be easily accessed and managed by the infrastructure team.

With examples like bet365’s, it’s becoming more and more apparent to the IT community that the most demanding new web applications, with millions of concurrent users, simply require a new breed of storage for their data. bet365 and others that are making these changes now are at the vanguard of technology and are paving the way for others as the “new breed” gradually becomes not only standard, but necessary to keep up with the rate of data growth.