People apparently still gamble even in a recession and in such numbers that requires a ''speedy, powerful transaction and gaming system'' according to the view of online global gambling giant PartyGaming.

The economic climate isn’t the only obstacle that PartyGaming has overcome. The U.S ban on online gambling sites has also impacted the company. But it's dealing with the ban by diversifying its gaming base and scaling up its operations with open source software from Terracotta.

PartyGaming claims that over the past year it's been able to improve customer experience increase its speed by offloading transactions to the Terracotta system which offers Java applications.

This approach could also benefit other sites as all verticals struggle to deliver increasing levels of service while reducing costs. PartyGaming are big users of open source software in many forms.

Terracotta develops an open source system that lets users coordinate and share data between servers with an approach called Network-Attached Memory (NAM). With NAM, Java Virtual Machines are clustered underneath applications, offloading processing and increasing transactional efficiency.

For PartyGaming there are open source systems on a base of games including sports betting, poker and blackjack among others.

After the U.S ban on online gambling sites that went into effect in 2006, PartyGaming lost 75 percent of its business. At that time more than 80 percent of is business was in poker, played in English and denominated in U.S dollars. Since then PartyGaming has diversified into multiple games, languages and currencies adding more transactions to the underlying application server.

This consequently adds up to an enormous amount of data and a lot of transactions with each multiple games going on at a given time and multiple people making bets. But by offloading the transactions to Terracotta it speeds up gaming applications.

Source:  Poker777 Staff

Monday, 08 December 2008