With more than 630,000 registered members, a professionally positioned and organized game and league system, and over 1,800 leagues for approximately 80 games from all genres, the Electronic Sports League (ESL) is the largest and most significant league for computer gamers in Europe. By mid-2006, the huge success of the ESL meant that the existing storage systems, on which all of the ESL data resided, could not meet requirements. Turtle Entertainment manages a data volume of approximately 10 terabytes for the ESL alone, doubling this amount every year. The direct-attached storage (DAS) system, which connects the storage components directly to each server, was not sufficiently scalable and resources were not used efficiently.

This case study explains how Turtle Entertainment managed to solve its problems through the migration onto a SAN architecture, powered by EqualLogic, and explains the related business benefits of SAN over DAS.