The Casino industry faces many challenges when it comes to information technology. In an ‘always on’ environment, there is little to no downtime. Consider some of the day-to-day issues:
- Usually operate in a 24/7 environment
- High levels of compliance required
- Multiple operations taking place concurrently
- In a high workload environment, IT infrastructure must be responsive
Red Hawk Casino was no different. However, the specific problem they were looking to address was to have enough IT horsepower to run an intensive reporting application in an acceptable time-frame. Specifically, their marketing department was struggling to run efficient reports against the database. Reports were taking 12-15 hours to run, and in the process, they were critically taxing the IT environment. Therefore, Marketing had to run the reports at night and hope they didn’t impact Operations. This situation was simply unacceptable and a solution needed to be found.
The root of the problem was in the amount of IOPs needed to sustain the IT environment while running the required marketing reports. During normal operations, Red Hawk was consuming 10,000 IOPs, but when the additional load of the reports were added, IOP consumption would spike to 30,000+ IOPs. The environment was a NetApp SAN storage architecture running with multiple VMWare hosts. Simply put, the current SAN could not support the IOPs necessary for the required workload and this was severely compromising speed and efficiency.
How to increase the IOPs without spending a fortune? The solution BigGreen proposed was the all-flash SAN technology from Pure Storage. This cost effective answer provided 200,000 IOPs to all applications, all the time. The Marketing reports now take 2 hours where they used to take 15, and they no longer compromise the speed of the rest of the IT environment. Even better, Marketing can now run those reports in the middle of the day without effecting Operations as all!
Every IT challenge should be examined independently, there is not a one size fits all answer. For Red Hawk, Pure Storage was a perfect solution to a specific problem. At Big Green IT, we come up with a solution to answer both the IT and the business requirements. Connect with us so we can help you find the best technology for your IT project.
To read more about Red Hawk Casino, download our case study, and feel free to call us with any questions.