Customer Stories

posted on 30 June 2008 06:01

EMC CLARiiON storage has been used by SEGA to develop a Samurai version of its Yakuza action/adventure video game, Like A Dragon or Ryū ga Gotoku, called Ryū ga Gotoku Kenzan!

The first version of the game was developed and published by Sega in 2005 for the Sony PlayStation 2. Sega announced that the budget for the game and its sequel together was 2.4 billion yen ($21 million), making it one of the more costly video games ever created. The sequel to the game, called Yakuza 2, was released in Japan on December 7, 2006 and announced for a European release during 2008.

Ryu ga Gotoku Kenzan!, was released in Japan on March 6, 2008 and published by Sega exclusively for the PlayStation 3. It is set in the Japanese Edo period in the city of Kyoto. Its story is a human drama that magnificently portrays the way of life of Samurai warriors who fought with swords and features four fighting style; fists, one blade, two blades and big blade.

This version of the game was released on Blu-ray Disc and features superior picture quality and High-Definition (HD) specifications, with almost twice the picture resolution of conventional game images. These changes resulted in greater complexity during the software development process and generated more than four times the amount of information as conventional games. SEGA selected NEC's full Fibre Channel CLARiX CX3 system for the development of this game, replacing its previous Direct Attached Storage (DAS) setup. (NEC sells EMC CLARiiON systems in Japan under the CLARiX brand.)

Mitsunori Fujimoto, the manager of the Development IT Support Team at SEGA CS Development Control, said: "Developing next generation game software requires pushing the boundaries and as we developed the next generation of Yakuza, we realized our existing storage solution was insufficient for our needs. We picked the EMC CLARiX CX3 UltraScale system to help us manage our information, attain the highest level of system expansion and robustness and speed time to market."

Previously game developers saved their work on local disks. For the new game they used a central external storage system. The initial order capacity was 4TB, which soon expanded more than 8 times to 34TB before the launch of the game in March 2008.

Developing this HD-quality game generated a lot of information and collaboration. "Nearly 100 developers at SEGA participated in the development of Ryū ga Gotoku Kenzan! and our information infrastructure had to cope with both the increase in capacity as well as complexity," Toshihiro Togo, the IT Support Team administrator at of SEGA Corporation said.

"Looking ahead, as HD-quality software games becomes mainstream, it is critical for SEGA's systems to have a robust capacity for expandability, and performance. Our experience with CX3 in the making of Ryū ga Gotoku Kenzan! has resulted in SEGA implementing other EMC products for future game development."

As the existing software code is multi-purposed for sequels and delivery over cellular phone platforms, SEGA needed to have access to its complete library of software code and images. A vast majority of this had been archived on tape libraries in the past, resulting in poor data recoverability and protection, a longer wait for access and in some cases, actual data loss. EMC is working with SEGA to migrate this data to EMC backup and archival storage systems in order to improve data safety and convenience, and to reduce the software development period.

Mitsunori Fujimoto said, "After system startup, EMC has continued its services including the execution of preventive measures before actual problems such as a capacity shortage occurs. Regarding its support system, EMC keeps further ahead of the pack than others. EMC provides a high level of quality not only for its products but also in its accurate responses to our questions regarding the TCO and maintenance services."

Samurai warriors prized the metal in their swords, which was beaten, folded over, beaten, folded over again, and again to provide the quality required. EMC has proved it has the mettle required by the Samurai game developrs at SEGA.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}