BarrièrePoker.fr Better Serves 10,000 Players, Responds 7x Faster, Thanks to High-Performance, Scalable Transactional Platform
 
 

BarrièrePoker.fr Better Serves 10,000 Players, Responds 7x Faster, Thanks to High-Performance, Scalable Transactional Platform

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Created from a partnership between Groupe Lucien Barrière and the French Gaming Group, BarrièrePoker.fr was launched in May 2010 as the first French operator to create a synergy between online and offline poker games. BarrièrePoker.fr gives players the ability to qualify online for participation in the most popular face-to-face Poker Tournaments, such as the World Series of Poker and the Barrière Poker Tour. BarrièrePoker.fr offers a poker game Website that allows players to play in flash mode or using a software download. The site also provides MyPoker Manager, an innovative software dedicated to multitabling, which optimizes game speed.

Operating an online poker platform based on a multiplayer structure requires an IT infrastructure that delivers 24/7 availability and high performance, as well as scalability to accommodate growing volume. Any latency problems or site outages could penalize players and create an unfair playing environment, which could degrade the brand.

BarrièrePoker.fr selected Oracle solutions—including Oracle Database and database management tools, as well as Oracle’s UltraSPARC T2+ servers, and Oracle Solaris—to offer players a high-quality, accessible, responsible, and ethical online poker experience. The new platform can host 10,000 players simultaneously, with an approximate 40-millisecond response time for main game actions. BarrièrePoker.fr relies on the virtualization capabilities integrated into Oracle Solaris to reduce gaming-platform investment costs. It also uses UltraSPARC T2+ server’s cryptographic, random number generator for the random generation of cards, which is something that online gaming regulatory authorities regularly look for in their audits.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from BarrièrePoker.fr

  • “As an online gambling operator, we must validate our business compliance annually with regulatory authorities. Thanks to Oracle, we can meet our players’ performance expectations while complying with stringent regulatory requirements. We can also maintain control over our in-house technology developments, allowing for faster and enhanced online poker offerings, over time.” – Pascal Sesques, Chief Technology Officer, BarrièrePoker.fr

  • Enable the company to reliably host thousands of online poker players simultaneously, especially during evening, weekend, and holiday peak times
  • Increase professional and nonprofessional poker players’ satisfaction with the site by ensuring fast response times for gaming actions, such as bets and transactions
  • Comply with Online Gaming Regulatory Authority (ARJEL) regulations and ensure the ability to respond quickly to the security auditor’s and player protection auditor’s requests, while strengthening regulators’ confidence in the gaming offering
  • Ensure that the company can securely manage an exponential growth in transactional data volume, such as data from online-registration, players’ account information, financial bets, and gaming actions
  • Guarantee that the online poker site is available around the clock, 365 days a year

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Implemented Oracle Database to support the new version of the online poker platform (BarrièrePoker.fr) and handle more than 1,000 transactions per second, while replacing a legacy, heterogeneous system that did not offer the same performance, upgradability, and high availability guarantees
  • Optimized performance for more than 10,000 simultaneous players with an approximate 40-millisecond, game-action response time, 7x faster than the old system, thanks to UltraSPAC T2+ server’s multithreading features and Oracle Database’s high performance
  • Optimized security management and access control to sensitive player account information by encrypting application data at the point of creation and by using Oracle Database’s inherent security features
  • Enabled audit and agreement approval for ARJEL’s annual Online Gaming Operator certification through the UltraSPARC T2+ encryption server, which supports the random number generation necessary for card shuffling without the need for a separate encryption solution
  • Manage more than 1.5 terabytes of transactional data (up to 10 gigabytes of new data per day) and optimize access time with Oracle Partitioning as well as vigilant archive file purging, to comply with online gaming regulations
  • Improved database administrators’ productivity with Oracle Enterprise Manager to efficiently manage 17 databases and quickly identify and address emerging problems
  • Guaranteed 24/7 availability for the online gaming platform with Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Active Data Guard replication services that also eliminated idle redundancy in the standby database environment
  • Improved storage resource management and capacity reallocation with Oracle Automatic Storage Management
  • Virtualized game application servers, as well as front-end Web servers, using Oracle Solaris’s zone capabilities—eliminating the need for a dedicated virtualization solution, thereby gaining security and performance at a lower cost than a standalone virtualization solution

Why Oracle

“Oracle provides us the performance guarantees necessary for operating an online multiplayer poker platform, both in terms of regulatory compliance and in response time for game action, as well as to manage large volumes of data. We can maintain control of our internal data, historical game data, and of the customer database, which today makes up the real value of our core business,” said Pascal Sesques, chief technology officer, BarrièrePoker.fr.

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