Aster nCluster protect Full Tilt Poker players from fraud

(18/09/2009)

Aster Data has announced that Pocket Kings, a software development and marketing company whose proprietary software powers the virtual online cardroom for Full Tilt Poker, has selected the Aster nCluster system for their data processing and data warehousing needs.

Full Tilt Poker will use Aster nCluster to provide better customer service to players, protect players from fraud, manage their increasing data volumes, and lower their data management and processing infrastructure costs.

“Aster Data provides a robust distributed data warehousing solution with powerful analytics capabilities that cuts down our end-to-end fraud analysis cycle time from 7 days to 15 minutes and queries that took 90 minutes now execute in 90 seconds,” said a spokesperson for Pocket Kings.

“Not only did we dramatically improve our fraud process by reducing analysis cycle times, and significantly increase analysis performance, but we have lowered our total cost of ownership; including lower hardware costs, software infrastructure, and maintenance.“

Because of the success of Full Tilt Poker, Pocket Kings found their data growth was becoming unmanageable, resulting in fraud-related analysis taking longer to process than customers demanded. Their rapidly increasing data volumes and analytical requirements resulted in increased infrastructure costs and lower overall margins. With their transactional data being stored in a traditional RDBMS that could not perform rich in-database analytics, Pocket Kings needed to export data to a different system for fraud analysis. The fraud process could only be run once a week due to the slow data movement and processing.

With Aster nCluster, performance has increased 115x because all processes are performed in-database, eliminating data movement and improving analytic processing throughput. Aster nCluster is processing 140,000 transactions per second versus 1,200 transactions per second with the previous system. Even more, the massively parallelized query processing is done across low cost commodity servers, saving money.

“Aster nCluster and In-Database MapReduce give Pocket Kings the ability to do something that was not possible before - run more sophisticated fraud algorithms, and run them significantly faster against ever-increasing data volumes,” said Mayank Bawa, CEO of Aster Data. “The dramatic improvement in query times, transactions per second and analysis throughput is made possible through Aster’s unique approach to analytics and Aster’s massively parallel architecture. The depth of analysis enabled by Aster makes a material difference to the business in areas such as fraud detection.”

Full Tilt will also use Aster to fuel customer access to Hand History Data. Playing poker without analyzing why some hands and maneuvers work better than others will only take you so far. If Full Tilt customers really want to take their game to the next level, they need to analyze their historical play day-by-day. Aster will enable Full Tilt customers to track each hand they play and review their play whenever they want.

In-Database MapReduce is a programming model that was popularized at Google in 2003 to process large unstructured data sets distributed across thousands of nodes. In-Database MapReduce enables enterprises to harness the power of MapReduce while managing their data in Aster nCluster, a highly scalable relational database system for frontline data warehousing.

Aster also announced the opening of its European headquarters. The office will be headed by industry veteran and newly appointed Europe Area Director Bob Pearson.

Related topics:  Data management and data security 

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