Across the PRD in the other SAR, Macau, casinos face data requirements as strict as many financial institutions. And, like financial-sector enterprises, they run their tech-gear 24/7.
At the Venetian Macao on the Cotai Strip, customers stream to its myriad casinos at any time of the day or night. According to Ashleigh Gilson, director of IT, The Venetian Macao-Resort-Hotel and The Casino Plaza, there are on average 8,000 transactions per hour at each of the company's three casinos--gaming operations that never close.
Last year, the company decided to buy a new storage system to replace HP equipment purchased in 2006. "The HP system was an aging storage infrastructure with limited flexibility--it couldn't support virtualization, tiered storage, and business expansion at Venetian Macao," said Gilson. "If we didn't buy a new system, we'd need to pay a lot more to upgrade the existing system and for future maintenance."
In addition, there were critical technical issues that Venetian Macao had to resolve. "In 2011, our storage level was already at 90% while backup time on average exceeded 15 hours--we definitely needed to reduce the backup window," he noted.
Data growth at Venetian Macao tops 20% annually. "While our heavy casino transactions eat up a lot of storage," said Gilson, "we generate lots of files daily because of our many development plans."
The enormous amount of customer data that Venetian Macao puts online also required a more robust storage system. "You might think that we can keep customer data offline, but even when customers only return every six months, we want their preferences immediately available to our frontline staff," said Gilson. "I think customers want us to remember their preferences and have no need to tell us what they want every time they return."
In addition, the firm needs a robust storage infrastructure that won't slow down its mission-critical systems such as the central priority services for dispatching guest requests during backup.
In view of the expansion it underwent last year, Venetian Macao had pressing needs for additional capacity and a faster storage system. "Storage is a basic building block of IT--when storage is impacted, the systems it supports are all in trouble."
The company invited vendors to analyze its storage problems. In February 2011, Dell held a workshop with Venetian Macao where Dell initially identified key challenges with the resort hotel's storage infrastructure.
Following the workshop, Dell conducted an in-depth assessment on its storage infrastructure. The vendor collected data on Venetian Macao's storage use and performance for analysis.
According to Gilson, the analysis results showed that the legacy storage array's response time slowed down mission-critical applications during backup periods. In addition, the outdated storage design could only assign storage resources to a set of disks statically.
Besides a vendor's analysis, Gilson said whether or not a vendor can provide local support in Macau is critical to the firm. "We don't want support from China or Hong Kong--when we need support we can't wait for the [support] person who comes to us after a one-hour ferry trip," he noted.
Asked why Venetian Macao invited vendors to do a storage infrastructure analysis rather than a product trial before vendor selection, Gilson said: "we did test before actual deployment of the system, but we didn't test any products during the vendor-selection stage because any tests done that way don't reflect the real situation."
Based on the assessment insights, Dell designed a new storage infrastructure. The vendor implemented multiple EqualLogic blade arrays for the three major sites--The Venetian Macao-Resort-Hotel and The Casino Plaza, then integrated them with Venetian Macao's existing IT infrastructure.
According to Gilson, the company also opted for 10G iSCSI technology or storage networking: "iSCSI's something new to us but we believe it's cost effective [for connecting different storage equipment]," he said.
The entire implementation took two months, said Gilson, adding that the Dell system went live in September 2011. While Dell systems are the majority in the firm's storage environment, Venetian Macao has also deployed products from other vendors, he added.
The Dell system provides a capacity of 60TB of usable data. "We have 38TB on our system, and we expect to buy additional capacity within two years," Gilson said.
Now the disk-to-disk backup system enables Venetian Macao to shorten its backup window to 3.5 hours and improve the performance of mission-critical applications during data backup time.
"Improved performance and the much shortened backup window are crucial to us," said Gilson. "We can't have planned outages at casinos where no closure window is possible--we can't ask people to come and play from 6am to 4pm."
Tiered storage is also possible with the system. According to Gilson, high-availability transaction systems for its casinos are now on tier-one storage while other business areas occupy tier-two and tier-three storage.
"We expect 30% cost-savings from buying a new storage system compared with upgrading the previous HP storage system," Gilson noted.
In his 154-strong IT team, there are only six people supporting the storage environment. "The system is easy to manage, so we don't have to dedicate many people to mend it and are able to allocate resources for other critical tasks," he concluded.