Holland Casino Goes "All In" with Dell Storage
Holland Casino Goes "All In" with Dell Storage
Dell Storage offers flexible and reliable platform, supporting rapidly growing, highly sensitive data volumes
The Casino cuts high-performance disk costs by 75 percent
Industry leading Copilot support proactively monitors infrastructure
Simplified system management reduces time needed to perform scheduled updates by almost 100 percent
AMSTERDAM--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Holland Casino has replaced its HP EVA storage system with a Dell Storage solution. The company now benefits from a reliable and flexible IT platform for key business processes in addition to 75 percent cost savings on the purchase of storage disks. As well as increased reliability, Holland Casino staff are also able to take advantage of a smoother user experience.
Holland Casino hosts IT for its 14 sites in a centralized data center that supports 600 end users as well as applications which hold customer contact and gaming information. The continuing growth of data volumes had meant that employees were increasingly suffering from delayed access to applications. Although the legacy storage infrastructure was able to scale out to meet growing capacity demands, the data could not be processed quickly enough which meant a new system was needed.
"Data is our focus," explains Henk Lammers, IT Operations Manager at Holland Casino. "We differ in this respect from many other organizations because our data management must comply with various government regulations which ensure that our customers have a safe and pleasant playing experience. For example, we have an active preventative approach which means that we hold specific data about our customers that helps us to ensure that they play within their means. We can therefore not afford for this sensitive information to be kept in a slow or unreliable environment."
Holland Casino opted to update to Dell Compellent because of its flexibility, stability, ease-of-management and Fluid Data approach. Besides scalability, the solution also integrates well with existing infrastructures by supporting both iSCSI and Fibre Channel.
Holland Casino's new Dell Compellent solution consists of three tiers. Tier one contains active data. Tier two is intended for data that's accessed less frequently. The third tier contains information which requires archiving. This has resulted in significant cost savings as Dell Compellent proactively monitors and automatically distributes data to tiers as needed, allowing only regularly accessed information to be stored on expensive, high-performance drives. The automatic data distribution also means that significantly fewer tier one disks are required than was previously necessary, reducing Holland Casino's spend on high-performance drives by up to 75 percent.
Improvements for the business and its users are both quantitative and qualitative. The IT team has reported that the new storage architecture is much more efficient, allowing administrators to spend more time on proactive tasks. The databases are now continuously available and applications run much more smoothly, both at startup and while in use. Measurable savings on administration times have also been made which avoids IT staff having to shut down the system during routine maintenance tasks such as firmware updates. As Holland Casino's IT infrastructure is expected to be available 24x7, that kind of maintenance had previously not only been very difficult to plan, but was also very time consuming. With the new infrastructure in place, Lammers estimates that with Dell Compellent Enterprise Manager he now needs only 2 hours instead of the previous 200 hours to perform maintenance tasks.
Lammers' favorite part of the new system is the Dell Compellent Copilot Support with its proactive approach to avoiding system disruption. Dell Compellent Copilot Support monitors Holland Casino's systems continuously and alerts them to potential problems before they affect the business processes. "It's important to always feel as though the storage system is running well. This is possible with Copilot Support. Experts from Dell continuously monitor the system to solve problems before they can have an impact. If anything is wrong, the team proactively alerts me. This is the way support should be handled in today's IT business landscape."
Quotes:
"With industry regulations to adhere to and customers to protect, we had an extensive tender document at the outset of this process. Dell came back with thoughtful suggestions which really supported our business requirements and also considered the legacy infrastructure that we have in place today. This gave us the confidence to choose Dell as our technology partner," said Lammers.
"Holland Casino is a good example of a customer who is benefiting from both technical and financial advantages by using Dell Storage and support solutions," said Graham Hill, Solution Director, Dell Netherlands. "At Dell, we believe that standards-based technology should play a complementary role to business operations, and this approach enables us to help drive customer success and growth across EMEA and beyond."
Additional Information:
Dell Storage
Dell Compellent
Dell Compellent Copilot Support
About Dell
Dell Inc. (NAS: DELL) listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and services that give them the power to do more. For more information, visit www.dell.com.
Dell
Simone Versteeg, +31 (0)20 6744737
simone_versteeg@dell.com
or
AxiCom for Dell
Adele Connell, +44 (0)20 83924062
adele.connell@axicom.com
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