Jackpot for Pillar and AccessFlow With New Customer Chukchansi Gold Resort & Casino
To virtualize the production and disaster recovery facilities
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on March 13, 2008 at 3:29 pmAccessFlow, Inc.,
a VMware Premier Partner announced that it has partnered with Pillar
Data Systems to provide a storage and server platform to virtualize
the production and disaster recovery facilities for Chukchansi Gold
Resort & Casino, ensuring data reliability and accessibility.
As one of the fastest growing casinos in California, Chukchansi mandates
high availability for all of its stored information across 65 servers.
In order to meet compliance requirements, the casino needed to reduce
the requirement for maintenance windows, address a diminishing backup
window, enable a real-time disaster recovery site, and lower overall IT
expenses despite a continuing need for additional servers.
To meet these challenges, Chukchansi turned to AccessFlow, which first
conducted an extensive assessment of the existing X86 and RS6000
environment utilizing VMware’s CapacityPlanner
and other tools. AccessFlow then designed a virtual infrastructure for
Chukchansi incorporating the Pillar Axiom Application-Aware Storage
system to enable application uptime and performance, with application
profiles that are optimized to work with the VMware ESX Server. Cisco’s
MDS SAN fabric technology was also incorporated into the virtual
environment.
“Our business is 24/7, and continuous uptime
is paramount,” said Dennis Peterson, director
of information technology for Chukchansi Gold Resort and Casino. “We
rigorously evaluated several alternatives to address our requirements.
AccessFlow’s virtual infrastructure solution,
incorporating VMware, Pillar, and Cisco technologies, provides us with
exceptional levels of performance and reliability across our core areas
of servers, storage, and networking. It reduces the cost of our IT
operation while significantly reducing both planned and unplanned
downtime.”
The resulting architecture reduced the server footprint from 65
production servers down to seven 2-CPU machines, including high
availability for all servers, and saving the Casino an estimated $1.2M
over a five year period with a payback period of less than 18 months.
“Chukchansi Casino presented an interesting
challenge,” said Gary Lamb, CTO of AccessFlow. “Its
requirement for immediate disaster recovery combined with a limited
budget meant that we needed an elegant solution that provided clear
efficiencies. AccessFlow is using the Pillar Axiom 500 SAN to host the
virtual machines at both the production and disaster recovery sites. As
part of the solution, we are also using Cisco MDS switches, which when
combined with Pillar’s Axiom, enables
real-time replication between the production and disaster recovery
facilities.”
“On-demand access to critical information and
applications is vital in the casino industry where data is as valuable
as the betting chips themselves,” said Bob
Maness, vice president of marketing, Pillar Data Systems. “Pillar
provides Chukchansi Casino with the safeguarding and reassurance that
information will be stored and protected in an efficient manner. We are
thrilled to work together with AccessFlow to continue cutting down costs
and increasing data reliability and application performance for the
growing casino.”
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