Stratics Interviews David Gardner

Stratics interviewed Icarus Studios' EVP David Gardner, who talked about their flagship Icarus Platform Tools. Here's a snippet:

Stratics: In reading your Network Architecture on the Icarus Platform, it is stated that this middleware has essentially eliminated single points of failure and makes hardware outages no longer a factor, as a result of the "chemeric" architecture and "self-healing" concept. Can you expand more on this idea and give us a bit more insight into how this will impact online worlds, especially MMOs, who experience server downtimes as a regular nuisance?

David: That's a great question. A lot of middleware providers have focused almost exclusively on production tools with very little R&D focused on post-production needs. Everything about the Icarus platform is next generation, especially the network architecture. Our server architecture is unique in that each server has the ability to morph into any type of server the virtual world needs at a given time. For example, if there is a particular event starting with thousands of users trying to log in all at once, lesser utilized servers will automatically re-task themselves to become login servers. This also means that if a server fails, other servers will re-task as needed to re-balance the network. Added to this, our bandwidth usage has been so optimized that, after the initial download, users can utilize the world just as well using only a dial-up connection. We see platforms today that are only getting twenty users per server and requiring over 15KB per user on average. Our architecture is able to support literally hundreds of users per server typically with less than 4KB needed per user. The net result of this is that our customers will be saving dramatic amounts of money on post production hosting as they scale.

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