Station Casinos Bets on Marathon to Keep Slot Machines Running
THE COMPANY
Station Casinos is the premier provider of gaming and
entertainment for residents of the Las Vegas
metropolitan area. The Station Casinos franchise
includes eight major gaming and entertainment
complexes, each with its own Windows-based Acres
Gaming applications to manage accounting and
player tracking for slot machine operations.
The Acres software also provides important
“bonusing" features on the slot machines for their
guests. The bonusing system provides personalized
delivery of prizes and loyalty rewards to players at
individual slot machines. This system helps build
customer loyalty—an important function in the highly
competitive gaming industry. A failure on one of the
servers running these applications can make the
bonusing features for the entire slot floor for that
location inoperable, resulting in inconvenience for
hundreds of guests and potential negative impact on
customer loyalty.
“The benefits of using Marathon go beyond the
obvious improved availability. When a problem
occurs, the property does not have to wait for a
specialist to arrive. In addition, the IT staff don't
have to come in during off hours on an emergency
call. That's good for morale.”
TAKING NO CHANCES WITH DOWNTIME
Station Casinos wanted a simple, affordable way to
protect their slot machine accounting and player
tracking systems from downtime. In addition, because
the IT staff is not immediately available at each
property 24/7, they also needed a solution that did
not require manual intervention to restore operations
after a failure.
THE CHALLENGE
Station Casinos IT staff evaluated several options for
protection. The "cold standby" servers they had used
in the past were only effective if the necessary IT staff
were immediately available on the premises. They
also considered the use of standard Microsoft
clusters, but the Acres slot system applications were
not "cluster aware" and would not operate after the
failover process. "The player tracking and bonusing
systems are critically important to our operations,"
said Steven Bastille, IT Director - Server and Desktop
Systems, Station Casinos. "We needed a sound
technology to protect them that would not require
specialized training, added staff, or increased
IT resources."
THE SOLUTION
Station Casinos worked with system integrator,
VTEC, Inc., to implement systems that were protected
with Marathon’s everRun FT™ software. "Marathon's
unique technology helped us meet this company's
requirements for complete application protection as
well as simple administration and maintenance," said
Bob Issenberg, President, Comport Consulting
Corporation. With the Marathon systems, the Acres
applications have operated continuously. The
systems deliver 99.999%+ availability and full
protection from faults, component failures, and
network connection failures.
THE RESULTS
"The benefits of using Marathon go beyond the
obvious improved availability of the applications,"
said Bastille. "When a problem occurs, the property
does not have to wait for a specialist to arrive and the
IT staff don't have to come in during off hours on an
emergency call. That's good for morale." Station
Casinos is currently using everRun FT software to
protect the slot player tracking at two properties and is
in the process of adding systems
in additional properties as part of their ongoing
upgrade process.
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