E3 Futura was set up in Spain in 1999 by a group of young people from the computing and communications world, led by Paco Ragageles. Having already organised the first two Campus Parties, the group now had a formal structure on which to base its future expansion. The annual Campus Party soon grew into Europe's largest LAN party, attracting the attention of major institutions and sponsors. In its fourth year, it celebrated the millennium by attracting 2,000 participants. Since then, it has almost trebled in size and greatly expanded its scope in terms of technologies and activities. Such is its renown that the 2006 edition was opened by Stephen Hawking, the world-famous physicist, using a videoconferencing link.
Campus Party is an annual gaming and internet event, held in Valencia, Spain, for the last seven years. The first Campus Party, took place in Malaga in 1997 and attracted 250 participants. The tenth in 2006 saw more than twenty times that number converge on the Valencia Trade Fair for a week of gaming, simulation, robotics, astronomy and development. Since 2003, it has been open to the public. It is the largest event of its kind in Europe.
Campus Party, Europe's biggest internet and gaming event, recently celebrated its tenth birthday with a week of non-stop action at the Valencia Trade Fair in Spain. With 5,500 participants involved in gaming, simulation, digital video production, robot-building, software development and various other activities around the clock for seven days, the need for a high-performance network could not be greater.
The event's organising body, Asociaciòn E3 Futura, knew that the network infrastructure had to offer the best possible performance in order to support an extremely demanding environment, in terms of network traffic and latency. The network also had to be secured against internal and external threats.
"When organising an event such as Campus Party, there are major technical challenges. One is the huge demand for bandwidth that results from thousands of participants all simultaneously making heavy use of the network. The other is the need to provide extremely high performance to support gaming in particular," says Belinda Galiano, Campus Party director at Asociación E3 Futura.
Asociación E3 Futura chose to work with ProCurve Networking by HP, which had successfully supplied the network infrastructure for the previous year's event, displacing the incumbent supplier, Cisco. According to Galiano, outstanding performance combined with good prices differentiated ProCurve Networking from the competition. Asociación E3 Futura asked ProCurve to provide a robust infrastructure for a 6,000-port network. Most importantly, the network had to be installed, configured and thoroughly tested before the event began.
Working with local partner Eurocomercial, the ProCurve Networking team designed, installed and configured the architecture with the aid of ProCurve Manager Plus software. One of the big challenges was the fact that the event was held across two adjacent pavilions. This necessitated a distributed core, with everything hinging on the performance of the link between the two halves of this core. To avoid any possibility of saturation, it was decided that the network backbone should offer a capacity of 50Gbps.
The team chose ProCurve 5412zl switches for the core, one in each pavilion. At the edge were 140 ProCurve 2650 switches with fibre SX links. Compared with 2005, more space was allocated for IP addresses, simplifying the routing among different groups and enabling any problems that might arise to be quickly pinpointed.
The ProCurve network had to not only meet the high demand of the applications being used by 5,500 gamers, but also had to be so reliable that it could withstand a range of internal and external attempts to bring it down. For the first time in ten years of Campus Party, there were no general issues with network performance or service. Total downtime was less than two minutes, with no interruptions to organised competitions. Gaming performance was superb throughout, with latencies of 5 milliseconds (ms) to 12ms for games that typically report 15ms on Local Area Networks (LANs).
"Having a network we can rely on is pivotal to the success of our annual events," said Paco Ragageles, managing director of Futura Networks, the company behind Campus party. "The network required a very high bandwidth, more than 80 Terabytes of data was shared among participants, and very high network speeds were required for the team gaming contests - less than 15ms ping time. It also had to withstand the pressure of attacks from the gamers who challenged themselves to try to bring the network down. I'm happy to say, they failed."
A variety of security threats were detected during the course of the event, including spoofing traffic, DOS attacks and SNMP attacks. With the aid of technologies such as virus-throttling, which are built into certain ProCurve switches, and the network management tool (ProCurve Manager Plus), these attacks were effectively countered. Mostly, Campus Party participants themselves were the source of the threats, reports Ragageles: "It's all a game for some of them. They even run unofficial competitions to see if they can crash different parts of the network. Fortunately, we were able to thwart their plans without restricting legitimate network traffic."
The ProCurve infrastructure also serviced the internet access of one of the other sponsors, Telefonica, which provided a record bandwidth of 3.8 Gigabits per second for the event.
Above all else, Campus Party has demonstrated the capabilities of ProCurve technology. If the technology can support enormous volumes of traffic under such challenging conditions, it will function successfully in even the most demanding of corporate environments. For Asociación E3 Futura, on the other hand, the event is ultimately about giving participants the best possible experience.
"This year's Campus Party was a great success in every respect. The ProCurve team made a big contribution to this success by providing such a high level of network performance and doing such a fantastic job overall," concludes Galiano.
Asociación E3 Futura, organiser of Campus Party, needed the best possible network infrastructure to support an extremely demanding 24x7 gaming and internet environment.
It engaged ProCurve to provide a robust infrastructure for a 6,000-port network whose core was distributed across two adjacent pavilions.
The ProCurve Networking business unit of HP is a supplier of enterprise networking solutions comprising wired and wireless networking products, services and solutions—including WAN routers, Ethernet switches, routing switches, wireless access points and network management applications—which allow customers to build networks based on open standards that meet current and future needs for security, performance and reliability.
The ProCurve Networking Adaptive EDGE Architecture is a unique design strategy that creates a secure, mobile, multi-service network by placing intelligence at the edge-where users connect and policies are enforced. This innovative approach creates a dynamic network infrastructure designed to keep up with advancing technology and user needs while protecting business investments.
When you are ready to explore the benefits a ProCurve Networking solution can offer you, call HP at 1-800-975-7682.
To learn more about ProCurve Networking's Adaptive EDGE Architecture™ solutions, visit our home page.
Purchase: In the US, HP business solutions, products, and supplies can be purchased at your local HP partner, or bought directly from HP either online or by calling 800-613-2222.
Finance: HP finance plans provide all the benefits of new technology without the risk or cost of ownership. For details, call 888-999-4783.
Accessibility: HP is committed to providing products and services that are accessible to people with disabilities. For more information, please visit the HP Accessibility web site or call 888-259-5707.
Belinda Galiano, Campus Party director
Asociación E3 Futura
Valencia, Spain
