Game On with Nutanix: Powering South Africa's Largest 24-Hour BYOC Gaming Bonanza at rAge!

Gaming 7 December 2023

Nutanix is pleased to announce that it will again run the Bring-your-own-Computer/Console (BYOC) LAN at rAge this weekend.

A long-time partner of rAge, Nutanix provides the perfect virtual backbone for what is now South Africa’s biggest BYOC 24-hour, 3-day celebration of gaming.

The Nutanix team and the rAge IT crew have laid over 7km of network wiring and 1km of electrical wiring to establish a custom power distribution system alongside a backup generator, ensuring that the computers are always operational.

Nutanix has tackled high performance, scalability, and reliability demands by employing hardware that accommodates various hardware setups, different virtualization hypervisors, and multiple cloud platforms. A notable aspect of Nutanix is the Prism management layer, which offers an easy-to-use, comprehensive management solution for Nutanix infrastructures.

"Rage is not just a key event for gamers, but it's also a gathering point for emerging talents who might venture into software development or IT careers. By sponsoring and providing the infrastructure for the LAN, we, once again, effectively demonstrate Nutanix as an advanced platform to what we consider the future IT pioneers of our digital world," comments Phillip de Waal, Systems Engineering Manager at Nutanix Sub-Saharan Africa.

“But beyond that, it is a great event that we love to support and showcase the true power of the Nutanix platform.”

To highlight the success of the Nutanix-powered LAN, at the 2022 rAge, the Nutanix environment served over 22TB to the LAN, a whopping 7.3TB of data was downloaded from the Internet, and the LAN traffic egress from the cache peaked at around 1.8Gbps and WAN ingress averaged at 6 Gbps.

Notably, of the Steam games played, the team could track 4125 hours and 39 minutes of Steam game time, which equates to around 171 person-hour days of gaming. Top games played included Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with 991 hours, Dota 2 at 864 hours, Call of Duty Modern Warfare II | Warzone at 645 hours, and Apex Legends at 137 hours played.

According to the stats, the LAN’s "top downloader" on the cache side grabbed 180GB of Steam content, followed by other users who moved 132GB, 77.7GB, and 71GB. The rAge LAN team also confirmed that the additional services it could run on the cluster included highly available DHCP and DNS servers, game servers, a cache server, and a Valve appliance, amongst other bespoke client services required during the event.

The rAge IT team says: “Nutanix has become a mainstay of the rAge LAN, and we value the team's assistance and support in these events.

Without the ability to manage the computing side of things in a highly available and scalable manner, the tech backbone of the event may be far more difficult or worrying. Not to mention that working with the Nutanix kit (and team) is always a blast.”

Supplied by: Nutanix

Guzzle Media