With casinos open around the clock, the customer-loyalty program relies on servers being up and running continuously. "It's fairly critical if we lose communication with our floor," Bastille said. "The slots keep working, [but] they don't pay out bonuses. The system may not even know the player's name when they play the slots. Basically, we can't provide the features that bring customers back."

The servers were prone to more failures than Bastille liked. Moreover, he could not solve the challenge conventionally by running the applications in a server cluster architecture, a popular way of providing automatic fail-over features, because the casino management applications Station ran were not "cluster-aware," he said.

The alternative, activating cold standby servers, could require a system administrator to roll out of bed, drive to a casino and flip the correct on switches, a process that could easily take many hours. So Bastille turned to Marathon's EverRun FT software. The software offers a way to keep Windows systems up and running in case of a potential hardware or software-related crash.

Station finished implementing EverRun late in 2005. Since then, said Bastille, none of Station's casinos have gone down because of a server hardware or EverRun software failure. Moreover, he has been able to reduce the number of servers per casino, including live and backup servers, from six to two by consolidating applications.

"There's very little we have to do. We get alerts if anything does fail. It's been a really big help for us to keep our casino floors up and running," he said.