Foxwoods Bets On SEPATON

SEPATON, Inc., the leader in high-performance data protection solutions, today announced that the world's largest resort casino complex, Foxwoods Resort Casino, has turned to SEPATON to protect and manage its data as its tape-based data protection systems could no longer handle the casino's growing requirements. The casino is running a SEPATON S2100(R)-ES2 Virtual Tape Library (VTL) with 60 TB capacity and two SEPATON Scalable Replication Engine(R) (SRE) technology nodes.

Foxwoods Resort Casino is comprised of six distinctive casinos, three hotels offering more than 1400 rooms, over 50 retail and restaurant outlets, over 7,400 slot machines and 380 gaming tables, and the 1,400 seat Fox Theatre which features world class performances, all under one roof. While customers play, casino staff use a wide range of advanced computer systems, including slot machine monitoring, state-of-the-art financial management, reservations systems, and a casino management application that tracks players and their ratings to keep this complex operating smoothly.

The gambling complex is owned by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, so the IT staff also provides crucial services such as 24/7 E911 communications to that community. The biggest concern was that the casino was having multiple media failures in its backup environment. When they could recover, it was slow. Restore times could take as long as 24 hours.

When the casino's tape-based data protection systems could no longer handle the volume of data being generated by their computer systems, Michael Grillo, Principal IT Engineer for Foxwoods, turned to SEPATON for a simple, effective way to store, protect and manage its data. Before choosing SEPATON, the casino IT staff had been using an IBM tape library, 10 tape drives, and Tivoli Storage Manager for its data backup/restore functions. "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 Grillo. "Additionally, those tapes never left the library. The data in the server was backed up in the same room. One computer-room disaster would bring down the house."

The casino needed a system that would cut backup and restore times, reduce the need for manual intervention and minimize downtime. IT also had to create a disaster recovery site. The casino evaluated the SEPATON S2100-ES2 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 at which we looked."

The casino installed a SEPATON S2100-ES2 virtual tape library with 60 TB capacity and two SEPATON Scalable Replication Engine Technology nodes. "The SEPATON system was up and running in a few hours," said Grillo. The casino IT staff configured the VTL in Tivoli Storage Manager in the same way they set up a physical tape library. They did not need to change policies, procedures or their backup target.

"The SEPATON system exceeded our expectations for performance - upwards of 200%, cut our backup time by one third, and cut our restore time in half, while reducing maintenance costs" said Grillo. The casino has also seen marked improvement in its tape reclamation and migration activities. The casino reduced the number of physical tapes it was managing from 1500 to only a few hundred used for off-site data vaulting, which is now located nine miles away in the disaster recovery site. For Foxwoods, the advantages of the SEPATON system are many. In the past, a failure could take up to 24 hours to restore because they had to wait for the drives to be free. Restore times for a recent outage have been cut to under two hours. The casino has also been pleased with the added reliability provided by the system. It has run continuously since it was implemented.

"Foxwoods Resort Casino astutely recognized the scalability, performance, reliance and cost-efficiencies of disk-to-disk backup and recovery over traditional tape-based systems," said Mike Worhach, president and CEO, SEPATON, Inc. "For SEPATON, we are most proud that we again bested our VTL competitors by delivering the fastest performing solution available on the market today."