Strategy in Practice

Challenge

Solution

Results

Is a VTL right for your organization?

Are you a candidate?

This "best practice" is part of a collection of advice provided by information technology professionals on how they have solved various challenges, and addressed IT priorities within their organizations.

The company:

Foxwoods Resort Casino

The challenge:

The largest resort casino complex in the world comprises six gaming facilities, three hotels with more than 1,400 rooms, 25 restaurants and a 4,000-seat entertainment arena. Casino staff use a wide range of advanced computer systems, including slot machine monitoring, state-of-the-art financial management, reservations systems, and many more to keep this complex operating smoothly. When the casino's tape-based data protection systems could no longer handle the volume of data being generated by these systems, their principal IT engineer turned to SEPATON for a simple, effective way to store, protect and manage their data.



Before choosing SEPATON, the casino IT staff had been using an IBM® TotalStorage® 3494 Tape Library with ten IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Tape System 3590 tape drives and IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager software for their data backup/restore functions. They created two sets of tapes for all data --- an on-site set for rapid access and a backup set that was stored off-site for disaster protection.



"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 Michael Grillo, Principal IT Engineer, Foxwoods. Managing tape media was also an inefficient use of their limited IT resources. "With just two people to handle all of our server administration as well as our data management, we couldn't afford to waste our time on handling tapes, dealing with backup failures and managing our space allocation. We knew we needed to move to a virtual tape library solution," he added.



The casino needed a system that would cut backup and restore times, reduce the need for manual intervention and minimize downtime. They also wanted a more efficient way of providing off-site disaster protection.



The casino evaluated the SEPATON® S2100®-ES2 virtual tape library (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 that we looked at."



The casino's on-site testing revealed that the SEPATON S2100 was a more fully integrated solution than other technologies. The SEPATON S2100-ES2 includes both the hardware and VTL software in an easy-to-implement appliance. "If we had a question, we wanted to be able to get the answer with one call," said Grillo. "Other solutions were not nearly as integrated and their support staff were not as knowledgeable in backup software as SEPATON."



The casino staff also wanted a solution that would help them leverage their investment in tape technology. "We considered a solution that worked with FalconStor® software," said Grillo. "But, because we came from an IBM Tivoli

• Email
• Print
• Share
  • Slashdot
  • Digg
  • Stumble
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine