CrowdStar Delivers Red-Carpet Mobile Gaming Experience with Internap’s Bare-Metal Cloud and Public Cloud Services

CrowdStar Delivers Red-Carpet Mobile Gaming Experience with Internap’s Bare-Metal Cloud and Public Cloud Services
Internap’s OpenStack-based hybrid solution maximizes performance and scale for interactive style game Covet Fashion

ATLANTA – July 23, 2015 – Internap Corporation (NASDAQ: INAP), a provider of high-performance Internet infrastructure services, today announced that mobile game developer CrowdStar is using Internap’s bare-metal cloud and OpenStack-based public cloud services to improve gaming performance and scale and deliver a seamless, red-carpet experience for its audience of style-conscious female gamers.

Based in Burlingame, California, CrowdStar creates interactive entertainment enjoyed by millions of women every day. Its flagship game Covet Fashion lets players style head-to-toe looks online with clothing and accessories from more than 150 leading brands, including BCBG, Rebecca Minkoff and Rachel Zoe. Players can also participate in styling challenges, vote on their favorite looks and make in-app purchases on real-life items.

As a result of Covet Fashion’s success, CrowdStar began to experience infrastructure capacity limitations with its previous infrastructure provider and often had to wait days or weeks for new servers to be provisioned. To address these challenges, it sought a gaming infrastructure solution that could instantly scale to meet current and future growth while ensuring the flawless experience that its users expect. After evaluating numerous providers, CrowdStar chose to migrate its full range of gaming workloads to Internap’s hybrid portfolio of bare-metal and public cloud services.

“Internap’s hybrid environment gives us the unique ability to scale capacity up and down on demand using bare-metal cloud or public cloud to align with different workload requirements and changing user patterns, which has resulted in substantial scale, performance and cost advantages,” said Jose Avila, vice president of engineering at CrowdStar. “We’ve achieved faster per-render processing of 60-70 milliseconds using bare-metal cloud and, with hundreds of thousands of renders per minute, this has made a direct impact on game image quality for our players. We also anticipate cost savings of 30 to 40 percent because of the inherently higher throughput of bare-metal cloud, which allows us to provision fewer instances to achieve our desired performance levels.”

CrowdStar is hosting Covet Fashion and other mobile and social games on Internap’s bare-metal cloud to ensure consistently high performance levels for players. Internap’s automated bare-metal servers combine the high throughput and processing power of dedicated servers with the ability to provision and de-provision instances in a matter of minutes. CrowdStar also hosts other performance-intensive gaming workloads on bare-metal cloud, such as databases, rendering engines and analytics. CrowdStar leverages Internap’s public cloud for variable capacity workloads, front-end servers and certain data stores, as well as to rapidly scale capacity during gaming traffic peaks. Internap’s public cloud also provides the advantages of OpenStack’s API-driven environment and rich ecosystem of standardized features like Heat, which helps CrowdStar accelerate infrastructure provisioning and de-provisioning through auto-scaling capabilities. Additionally, since bare-metal and public cloud instances can be provisioned on an hourly basis to match gamer activity, CrowdStar is able to better manage overall infrastructure costs.

Internap’s route-optimized Performance IP transit service builds on these performance benefits, reducing network latency for CrowdStar gamers around the world. Furthermore, Internap allows CrowdStar to future-proof its investment in public and bare-metal cloud services through hybridization with other infrastructure, such as colocation – a cost-effective option for static workloads – as its needs evolve.

“We’re excited to be supporting CrowdStar with the right infrastructure mix to help them address the rapidly-growing online gaming market,” said Satish Hemachandran, senior vice president and general manager, cloud and hosting, at Internap. “The flexibility of Internap’s hybrid solutions, which include on-demand bare-metal and public cloud services, allows innovative gaming companies like CrowdStar to achieve effortless scale, performance, and most importantly, satisfied gamers.”

With a high-performance, hybrid portfolio that spans public, private and bare-metal cloud, colocation and managed hosting services, Internap is able to support any gaming application, from massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) to mobile and social games, or use case, such as new game launches, test and dev environments and massive on-demand scaling workloads. As a result, leading game developers, publishers and distributors – including CCP Games, CipSoft, CrowdStar and Hi-Rez Studios – are turning to Internap to optimize gaming infrastructure and deliver the ultimate player experience.

Supporting Resources:
• Customer spotlight blog – CrowdStar Reduces Costs and Improves Performance: http://www.internap.com/2015/07/23/crowdstar-reduces-costs-improves-performance
• Forrester Research report – Consider Bare-Metal as a Viable Cloud Option: http://www.internap.com/resources/forrester-report-bare-metal-cloud/
• White paper – Building Online Gaming Infrastructure:
http://www.internap.com/resources/five-considerations-building-online-gaming-infrastructure/

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About CrowdStar
CrowdStar creates interactive entertainment for women, blending elegant, polished aesthetics with aspirational gameplay. The company’s flagship fashion styling game, Covet Fashion, entertains millions of women around the world daily. Covet Fashion brings a whole new genre of fashion entertainment as the only app that lets users style head-to-toe looks with actual brands - including BCBGMAXAZRIA, Rebecca Minkoff, Rachel Zoe and more.

Founded in 2008, CrowdStar has deep roots in designing inventive games for women. The company is backed by strategic investors Time Warner and Intel Capital and boasts global partnerships with Tencent, NHN and Facebook. CrowdStar's games can be found across multiple platforms including Apple's App Store, Google Play, Amazon, and Microsoft. Learn more at www.crowdstar.com.

About Internap
Internap is the high-performance Internet infrastructure provider that powers the applications shaping the way we live, work and play. Our hybrid infrastructure delivers performance without compromise – blending virtual and bare-metal cloud, hosting and colocation services across a global network of data centers, optimized from the application to the end user and backed by rock-solid customer support and a 100% uptime guarantee. Since 1996, the most innovative companies have relied on Internap to make their applications faster and more scalable. For more information, visit www.internap.com.

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2015-07-23 11:53:00