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 In addition, the outdated storage design could only assign storage resources to a set of disks statically.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."