Foxwoods
Bets On SEPATON
SEPATON, Inc., the leader in
high-performance data protection solutions,
today announced that the world's largest resort
casino complex, Foxwoods Resort Casino, has
turned to SEPATON to protect and manage its
data as its tape-based data protection systems
could no longer handle the casino's growing
requirements. The casino is running a SEPATON
S2100(R)-ES2 Virtual Tape Library (VTL) with
60 TB capacity and two SEPATON Scalable Replication
Engine(R) (SRE) technology nodes.
Foxwoods
Resort Casino is comprised of six distinctive
casinos, three hotels offering more than 1400
rooms, over 50 retail and restaurant outlets,
over 7,400 slot machines and 380 gaming tables,
and the 1,400 seat Fox Theatre which features
world class performances, all under one roof.
While customers play, casino staff use a wide
range of advanced computer systems, including
slot machine monitoring, state-of-the-art financial
management, reservations systems, and a casino
management application that tracks players and
their ratings to keep this complex operating
smoothly.
The
gambling complex is owned by the Mashantucket
Pequot Tribal Nation, so the IT staff also provides
crucial services such as 24/7 E911 communications
to that community. The biggest concern was that
the casino was having multiple media failures
in its backup environment. When they could recover,
it was slow. Restore times could take as long
as 24 hours.
When
the casino's tape-based data protection systems
could no longer handle the volume of data being
generated by their computer systems, Michael
Grillo, Principal IT Engineer for Foxwoods,
turned to SEPATON for a simple, effective way
to store, protect and manage its data. Before
choosing SEPATON, the casino IT staff had been
using an IBM tape library, 10 tape drives, and
Tivoli Storage Manager for its data backup/restore
functions. "The volume of our data and
the complexity of our infrastructure had grown
to a point where tape backup was no longer an
option for us," said Grillo. "Additionally,
those tapes never left the library. The data
in the server was backed up in the same room.
One computer-room disaster would bring down
the house."
The
casino needed a system that would cut backup
and restore times, reduce the need for manual
intervention and minimize downtime. IT also
had to create a disaster recovery site. The
casino evaluated the SEPATON S2100-ES2 VTL and
several other disk-based solutions. "Our
need for high performance quickly narrowed the
field," said Grillo. "SEPATON was
much faster for both backup and restore than
any of the other solutions at which we looked."
The
casino installed a SEPATON S2100-ES2 virtual
tape library with 60 TB capacity and two SEPATON
Scalable Replication Engine Technology nodes.
"The SEPATON system was up and running
in a few hours," said Grillo. The casino
IT staff configured the VTL in Tivoli Storage
Manager in the same way they set up a physical
tape library. They did not need to change policies,
procedures or their backup target.
"The
SEPATON system exceeded our expectations for
performance - upwards of 200%, cut our backup
time by one third, and cut our restore time
in half, while reducing maintenance costs"
said Grillo. The casino has also seen marked
improvement in its tape reclamation and migration
activities. The casino reduced the number of
physical tapes it was managing from 1500 to
only a few hundred used for off-site data vaulting,
which is now located nine miles away in the
disaster recovery site. For Foxwoods, the advantages
of the SEPATON system are many. In the past,
a failure could take up to 24 hours to restore
because they had to wait for the drives to be
free. Restore times for a recent outage have
been cut to under two hours. The casino has
also been pleased with the added reliability
provided by the system. It has run continuously
since it was implemented.
"Foxwoods
Resort Casino astutely recognized the scalability,
performance, reliance and cost-efficiencies
of disk-to-disk backup and recovery over traditional
tape-based systems," said Mike Worhach,
president and CEO, SEPATON, Inc. "For SEPATON,
we are most proud that we again bested our VTL
competitors by delivering the fastest performing
solution available on the market today."
|