Ensuring global, uninterrupted connection to the international servers represents a real challenge for employees, hardware and software. To ensure that players from over 200 countries around the world can enjoy “their” favorite game in one of up to 42 different languages, while counting on a fast connection with low latency, a team of highly-motivated experts in System Administration maintains and supports a modern and extremely high-performance system.

Before one of currently over 1,500 servers (status as of: November 2011) can be started at one of three 10-Gbit computer centers, elaborate security measures must be set up and the on-time go-live must be carefully scheduled by the system administrators. A detailed plan is therefore set up in close cooperation with project management for the corresponding products in order to ensure simultaneous setup of several servers in different regions with various products. This also includes continuous maintenance, monitoring, and 24-hour support for any arising problems. This is a considerable achievement, given the sheer number of products and country versions. Short-notice hardware delivery bottlenecks, last-minute changes when uploading products, or acute problems can send employees’ adrenaline levels soaring.

Travian Games is one of the few online game providers worldwide with dedicated connections to tier-1 providers. With three, autonomous server centers (each 10 Gbit), it is able to handle heavy system traffic as well as to quickly intercept any failures. The company’s Munich head office is also equipped with a 10Gbit fiber-optic cable for large data quantities. This makes data bottlenecks a thing of the past, and even dozens of petabyte data transfers per year are no problem for Travian Games systems.