Simplified operational management with professional guidance
During and after implementation of its new platform and management technology, Square Enix’s IT Division teams worked closely with Red Hat consultants to troubleshoot any issues with the Linux environment and continuously adjust related processes in alignment with strategic goals.
“Red Hat Consulting ventures beyond limited, high-level solutions,” said Mr. Nakata. “Rather than only addressing specific tasks like initial construction or introductory support, Red Hat Consulting presented an optimal solution after investigating and researching our operations. Their approach aims for overall optimization right through to implementation. This level of consulting is rare.”
In Japan’s unique IT engineering market, highly skilled in-house talent is essential to success—and recruitment can be challenging and time-consuming. Hands-on collaboration with Red Hat helped Square Enix’s existing IT staff quickly expand their Linux skills with insight into best practices and new perspectives. “We take pride in our ability to solve problems on our own, but our involvement with Red Hat has accelerated the speed at which we improve the quality of our work to continue delivering a positive player experience,” said Mr. Miyamoto.
Improved IT security with built-in management capabilities
During more than 10 years of development and operation, Dragon Quest X Online has experienced several problems affecting the Linux kernel and libraries. When issues arose, the skilled staff responsible for day-to-day system operations would analyze the source code and perform time-consuming troubleshooting.
Square Enix’s IT Division has used the new Linux management capabilities provided by its Red Hat software to simplify code debugging and security management, helping teams focus on more valuable work. Red Hat Satellite tracks and manages server status centrally, helping teams quickly prioritize and resolve high-impact vulnerabilities and performance issues. Ansible Automation Platform also helps mitigate potential human errors in device configuration that could create vulnerability or other security risks.
"Since switching to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we can more quickly discover and investigate bugs and vulnerabilities than in the Linux distribution we were previously using,” said Mr. Miyamoto.
Established foundation for application scalability with containers
To continue improving the scalability and responsiveness of the systems supporting Dragon Quest X Online, Square Enix’s IT Division team worked with Red Hat Consulting to plan adoption of a container-based service architecture.
“Although it’s possible to create your own containers, you have to consider that often you’re planning and developing long-term operations,” said Mr. Nakata. “That’s why it’s valuable to have guidance from consultants like Red Hat’s, who have experience with container adoption journeys for enterprises and their existing architectures supporting critical services and systems.”
Although Docker is a well-known application execution environment for containers, the team decided to use Podman, an open source tool developed by Red Hat engineers with the larger community, to gain additional capabilities for developing, managing, and running Linux containers.
