BC2022

Chukchansi Gold Resort&Casino Hits the Jackpot with DR Virtualization

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 migrated to a virtual infrastructure reducing the server footprint from 65 production servers down to seven 2-CPU machines, including high availability for all servers. The process started with a Capacity Planner assessment and included virtual storage, network and backup in addition to servers. The implementation will save the Casino an estimated $1.2M over a five year period with a payback period of less than 18 months.
Chuckchansi also virtualized disaster recovery by incorporating EMC Recovery Point and Cisco MDS architecture to enable real-time replication between the production and disaster recovery facilities. This initiative provided further huge ROI savings based upon cost of downtime. The next step is to incorporate VMware's Site Recovery Manager in order to automate the DR process between locations.

Technical Overview Session

Networking; Storage / Backup; VMware Infrastructure; Virtualization Platform / Hypervisor

1 Hour

Gary Lamb( AccessFlow ), Dennis Peterson( Chukchansi Gold Casino & Resort )

Dennis is responsible for the strategy, architecture, management, development, support and operations of the entire portfolio of Chukchansi Gold Resort & Casino's business systems, gaming systems and infrastructure. In addition, Dennis is responsible to assure that IT endeavors support the immediate goals and long-term objectives of the casino, focusing on increasing and quantifying service delivery to the various business units at Chukchansi Gold Resort & Casino through improved processes and defining key performance indicators to monitor IT success.

Gary Lamb has spent the last 5 years working on designing and deploying VMware VI3 server in the enterprise. He has co-authored multiple books and white papers on virtualization technology. Gary has worked as a MVS Systems programmer, LAN/WAN design and integration architect and an enterprise security assessment practitioner. He has an extensive background in disaster recovery. Gary is sought after by several storage manufacturers looking for his insights on building their products to interact optimally with SRM.