A company that gives its product away for free has to keep expenses low any way it can.

That's what CDC Games, a gaming company that last month launched a multiplayer online role-playing game in the United States, focuses on, but company general manager Ron Williams is frustrated by what he calls a lack of server products geared to the gaming industry, as well as misplaced incentives in data center collocation.

CDC Games, which is big in China's online and mobile gaming markets, has entered the U.S. market with Lunia, which customers can play for free but in which they are charged extra for optional enhancements that improve the abilities of their online fighters. CDC has built its infrastructure with IBM System x servers and IBM's iSCSI storage, and it stores this gear at Terremark's Miami collocation center. 

Click to see: CDC Games' Lunia multiplayer online game

While complimenting IBM for offering good prices and service relative to the competition's, Williams says vendors like IBM, HP and Dell should start making stripped-down servers geared to the needs of online gaming companies and other software-as-a-service vendors.

CDC has about 40 dual- and quad-core servers that cost $5,000 to $6,000. As well as the IBM servers perform, Williams wonders why he can't get a $2,500, stripped-down box to meet his simple needs of processing power, memory and shared storage. Williams says CDC and other gaming companies don't need all the extra bells and whistles designed for enterprises, like integrated RAID controllers and remote management.

"All of us are taking these generic, commoditized servers and trying to do the best we can, when what we really want is a stripped-down box that's of high quality," Williams says. "IBM can't afford to keep all kinds of models around, but I think as we move more into cloud computing, someone is going to have to create [more stripped-down servers] for us, whether we're gamers or software-as-a-service."

IBM, which has promoted its relationship with CDC Games, offered a "no comment" when asked if it is considering developing a server along the lines Williams suggests.

Williams has been managing the CDC games division in Atlanta since last August, and before that led the company's software-as-a-service efforts.

Some gaming companies use blade servers, but the power savings offered by blades may not benefit customers who rent out space in collocation facilities, Williams says. (Compare blade server products.)

"There are very few data centers that allow us to take advantage of power savings," Williams says, hitting on a problem discussed by numerous industry observers: Data center space is usually paid for by the square foot, even though most of the costs are for power and cooling rather than floor space.

CDC Games nonetheless has found some ways to keep long-term costs low, Williams says. Lots of gaming companies store data in the internal hard drives on a server, which may be cheap upfront but isn't very efficient, he says.

"The game industry is still pretty immature, there's not a lot of thought put into TCO these days," Williams says. "Because [our games] are free to play, we look for every percentage of margin we can."

Fibre channel would have been too expensive, so CDC went with low-cost, centralized storage in the form of three iSCSI-based IBM DS3300 storage arrays, and uses storage virtualization to make the system more flexible. Being able to move storage quickly from one server to another should make it easier to get the system back up quickly in case of unplanned downtime, Williams notes. He has a staff of three IT professionals, outsources some monitoring and maintenance to China, and is counting on a lower management overhead to make CDC's $40,000 investment in iSCSI financially worthwhile.

Keeping players happy is key to CDC's success, of course, and it's not always easy. Latency is a big annoyance to players because Lunia uses a real-time, arcade-like fighting system, rather than a turn-based one in which players take turns as they would in a chess match. CDC is planning to install servers on the West Coast to lower latency times.

"Even on a great day we see 70 milliseconds [latency] from the West Coast to Miami, which is pretty good, but we'd like to get it closer to 40 or so," Williams says.

Internet routing snafus can harm the playing experience, but leasing space from Terremark comes in handy because the company has close relationships with more than 100 telecommunications companies, Williams says.

Lunia has an average of several thousand users online at any given moment, several hundred during the slowest times. CDC will add capacity as needed when its user base expands, and try to avoid some of the downtime problems that plagued the game's first month online.