A-Rush Gaming Lounge

Based in the Houston Texas area, A-Rush is an esports gaming lounge and internet café.
It provides all players with a high-end gaming experience and top of the line gaming
systems, including virtual reality and racing simulation.

With community one of the biggest parts of today’s gaming, A-Rush wants to be certain
it delivers an experience that gamers will enjoy time and time again, and will happily
recommend to friends

Gaming isn’t all play

However, A-Rush has been struggling to find a way to better handle today’s gaming
burden. Despite its rapidly expanding popularity and the rise of gaming lounges worldwide,
modern gaming comes with a regular and often problematic headache – updates.

Across the Americas, PlayStation and Xbox downloads alone were responsible for nearly 8%
of internet traffic in the first half of 2020*.

Modern gaming software updates are big, regularly 25-50GB in size – but some can be
huge, as large as 250GB. New and upcoming games require much bigger installation sizes,
and need larger and more regular updates. Some games update on a weekly basis.

But such bandwidth intensive downloads for a single game risk swamping esports
connectivity. Multiply that by the hundreds of games a lounge needs to offer, then by the
number of gaming stations offered (40 at A-Rush), and you have a serious congestion issue
that impacts revenue and the customer user experience.

Business impact

For A-Rush, software updates meant taking gaming stations offline for long periods. The
longer each game and each device needed to update, the higher the loss in revenue.

Joint business owner Derrick Fields explains, “Gaming is so popular nowadays. We’re
seeing more and more videogame cafes/bars opening up. But modern gaming updates
are huge, take hours to pass through the internet pipe, and happen all the time! Imagine
how slow things got when we had 40 PCs all trying to complete these huge updates at the
same time!”

With congestion risking a slowdown in the gaming experience, the team split the practice
into smaller groups of PCs. But, as Derek pointed out, “It used to take hours because we
had to do all our updates in batches of 4, which was extremely time-consuming.” As they
also needed to wait for updates to complete before moving on to the next batch, far too
many hours were being wasted every week.

Offloading updates by serving them locally

Admitting to having limited server experience and knowhow, Derek was delighted to
discover CACHEBOX’s proven experience handling updates for all manner of operating
systems and apps, from Microsoft to antivirus.

With a highly specialised cache, update files need only be downloaded once to local
storage. Served directly over the LAN, all subsequent requests can be met – at much faster
LAN speeds. A-Rush’s games, firmware and PC software can be updated without further
access to the internet.

CACHEBOX also deploys expert algorithms to download whole upload files and serve just
the parts needed by each individual request, helping them clear the network faster.

In dramatically slashing demand for the internet, congestion simply doesn’t occur. Instead,
capacity is freed for other content, more games, or the potential to add more gaming
stations – all without a change to existing bandwidth.

Instant results

Impressed, Derek quickly deployed a CACHEBOX130. Its impact was instant. The majority
of A-Rush’s typical internet traffic was gone and up to 86% of content was being served
from cache. Terabytes of gaming updates were now being handled by CACHEBOX.

In February 2020, the top gaming domains for the month show the vast majority of
demand being met locally.

But with 40 gaming stations also running Microsoft platforms, CACHEBOX has helped
offload even more software updates. Up to 87.8% of Microsoft and Windows content, as
well as 86.5% of essential graphic hardware updates, are now served locally.

Derek has been delighted with the results, “We set up the device and started seeing really
impressive bandwidth savings straight away – we’re now serving 86% of our content from
the CACHEBOX, rather than fetching Terabytes of gaming updates from the internet – and
the difference really shows.”

All-at-once and automated

A-Rush previously struggled with wasted manhours and downtime. CACHEBOX delivers
much more. Updates can now be served concurrently to all stations – updating them at
the same time and doing so without intervention.

With updates automated and able to run outside lounge opening times, there’s no need
to take any PCs offline. Precious gaming hours – and revenues – including 24 hour weekend
sessions, are no longer impacted.

And with no staff member needing to be there to kickstart it, monitor progress or be there
at the end to ensure it is complete, Derek is delighted. “As soon as we installed CACHEBOX,
we noticed the difference straight away. CACHEBOX now looks after the updates
automatically – the bandwidth savings are great – but I’ve also saved so much time!”

Faster than the internet

All that data served locally is also arriving at much faster LAN delivery speeds – often over
100 times faster than from the internet.

In the same month, both gaming downloads and operating system updates – served free
of any upstream web interference – are arriving at 20, 80 and even 110 times faster than
internet speeds.

Easy to use, quick to perform

Equipped with comprehensive performance reports that confirm A-Rush’s now foremost
user experience, Derek is ready to recommend CACHEBOX’s outstanding performance to
other gaming lounges, “Comparing before and after we had CACHEBOX is like night and
day. The bandwidth savings we’ve seen have been phenomenal, CACHEBOX has had a
huge impact on our organisation! It’s saved us a huge amount of time and now customers
can continue to use the devices without experiencing any slow downs.”

Derek is also relieved by how easy everything has been. “I had very little understanding of
networking at all but the support team walked me through the setup in under an hour total!
I’ve been very impressed with how high performance and low maintenance this product is.
I can’t imagine running a place like this without it!”

 

* The Global Internet Phenomena Report, COVID-19 Spotlight, May 2020 by Sandvine

 

 Download A-Rush Gaming Lounge’s case study (256KB)