Case Study: NHN Entertainment achieves rapid OpenStack VM provisioning and 50% storage savings with NetApp

NHN Entertainment Lays a Foundation for Market Expansion with Cloud Services for Game Developers

NHN Entertainment, South Korea’s largest PC and mobile game developer, launched the TOAST cloud platform to accelerate global expansion into the $40B mobile games market. To support game developers with a production-grade platform, the company needed a resilient, high-performance OpenStack infrastructure that could provision VMs quickly, guarantee 24/7 availability, scale for rapid data growth, and minimize storage costs and operational risk.

NHN deployed NetApp FAS8020A systems with clustered Data ONTAP and native OpenStack Cinder integration, using Flash Cache, FlexClone, Snapshot, deduplication, and thin provisioning to deliver high IOPS and efficient storage. The result: VM provisioning reduced to about 30 minutes, sustained performance beyond the 100,000 IOPS target, roughly 50% lower storage needs, nondisruptive operations, and faster time-to-market for games and new cloud services.

NHN Entertainment

Do-Min Paik

IT Service CIO