July 13, 2010

When Station Casinos began looking to upgrade the data centers at its 18 Las Vegas area casinos, the gaming and entertainment company bet big on Cisco technologies.

With its 12,000 employees, the company is using Cisco's Storage and Data Centre technologies in its data center virtualization strategy to streamline customer operations and drive business growth. It's also using Cisco's Unified Communications technologies to tie its 18-site phone system together on a single infrastructure, and as gaming applications to the network – a step that's expected to greatly improve the gaming experience for customers and casino team members alike.

Cisco Unified Communications is the networking giant's revolutionary data center initiative, which uses the network to intelligently allocate pooled network, compute, storage and virtualization resources wherever they are needed. To learn more about how Station Casinos is using this and other Cisco technologies, News@Cisco spoke with Bryan Miles, executive director of networking and telecommunications at Station Casinos.

Why did Station Casinos decide to use Cisco Unified Communications Technologies?

Bryan Miles: When I started working at Station Casinos 4 years ago, we had multiple different networks – a phone network, a gaming network, a network for the sports betting systems, even a dedicated phone network for a hotline system between all of the sportsbooks. We didn't even have the Internet on our network. If someone at one of our sites wanted online access, our typical response was to get the service from our local cable provider.

We were introduced to Cisco's Unified Communications System via Unified Communications Manager (formerly CallManager), which is Cisco's business-class IP telephony call-processing system. At the time, we were in the middle of planning for a couple of new casinos, so we started looking at using Cisco's Unified Communications Systems in the infrastructure of those and it just made sense. At the Gun Lake Casino in Michigan that we're going to manage, for instance, we saw we could go from 16 switches down to two right off the bat, and we would have much more memory for our virtual machine deployments. We also talked about additional deployments with our server group and our slot group, which manages another set of servers and the databases, and they came on board as well.

Today, the multiple different networks are gone. They've all been consolidated down to a single core network, and everything we've tried has just made sense, both in terms of speed of deployment, reduction in infrastructure size, and improved cost versus capacity. We don't see any reason to go back.

How is Station Casinos using UCS?

Bryan Miles: One way we're using it is as part of our data center virtualization strategy, which is aimed at streamlining customer operations and driving business growth. Each of our 18 properties has its own data center, although the smaller ones tend to have just one server. We're working on the first one now, moving from 10 stand-alone servers to three blades. In addition to server consolidation, there are also fewer network ports, fewer SAN ports, more efficient cooling and power usage. We've even been able to give one of the rooms we were using for half of the data center back to the casino, which is a big thing because in a casino space is worth gold.

We are a VMware shop and have been for a couple of years now. We've taken all of our server platforms and migrated them onto the Unified Communications System, and now we're looking at upgrading our servers, which we try to do every four or five years. We have 500 virtual servers and we've pretty much virtualized everything we can, except for Microsoft Exchange and the Microsoft SQL database. On average, we probably have between four and eight virtual servers per physical server, but with the next project we're about to do, we're going to try to put 16 servers on one blade and see what happens.

 Our corporate office is its own Unified Communications Manager cluster and Cisco IP phone system. It was our first deployment. After that, we did two casinos – Wildfire Lanes, which is one of our smaller properties; and Aliante, which is a full-blown casino resort that is all VoIP and has its own cluster. And now we're in the middle of taking all 18 sites VoIP, not only managing all of our phone calls internally, but we're also going to do VoIP to the central office of our phone provider. It's going to be a totally redundant phone system in our own phone network.

As we started to build this VoIP system, an initiative came up to centralize our PBX and reservations into one building. We ended up taking all the phone systems and tying them together by building another Unified Communications Manager cluster, which we call the "GLC" cluster. It manages connections between all the phone switches and is basically the central call routing for the entire company. The next evolution of that will be to create another two clusters – a front-of-house and back-of-house cluster – and put all the properties on it and physically distribute pieces of it throughout the major 11 or 12 properties.

How does UCS affect gaming activities?

Bryan Miles: I believe we are one of the first gaming companies to run server-based gaming systems across our network, and we're looking to use Unified Communications Systems to do it. Actually, network-based gaming is a more accurate description because what we're doing is pushing, controlling, managing and serving the games across the network. When you say server-based gaming, a lot of people believe that the game is running on the server but it's not the case.

At any rate, we're seeing a number of advantages to this, such as when we "reset the floor," which is like rebooting all the machines, usually for accounting purposes or perhaps to push new code out to the slot machines. At most casinos resetting the floor used to take up to a hour with residual effects and guest impact lasting at least an another hour .  At our newest property Aliante, with the network infrastructure and the system virtualized, it takes less than 10 minutes. Aliante is a 1 GB infrastructure with 2,400 machines and it's a network-based deployment. We're probably going to get to the point where we're as close to instantaneous floor resets as possible with the bandwidth. Eventually it will be a centralized system.

How will UCS change gaming activities in the future?

Bryan Miles: One thing we're going to be able to do soon is change the casino floor depending on the type of crowd we're expecting that evening. If you frequent a casino on a regular basis, you'll notice the games move around. What you're going to start seeing now is that the machine will look the same but the game will be different. The ultimate goal is to get to the point where a customer can sit down at their favorite spot in the casino instead of their favorite game, and they can play whatever game they want to play. We're years out from that, and we're not going to be able to change machines on the fly any time soon, in part due to gaming regulations. But soon we are going to be able to do these floor changes on a daily basis, rather than on a weekly or monthly basis as is the case today.

A floor manager will be able to say, 'Hey, it's Wednesday night, it's senior night, and seniors like these 20 games. I'm always busy over in this section, which is where game No. 1 is, so I'm going to take another section and make it all game No. 1 as well.' And we'll be able to push the game information down to the slot floors. But eventually we're going to be able to do it without interrupting the guests, or only interrupting them for a minute or so. And that has a direct revenue impact.

How is UCS helping with ease of data center management?

Bryan Miles: One of our server administrators was able to provision one or two servers after five or 10 minutes of playing with the Virtual Dynamic Data Center (VDDC). He said it was a much cleaner interface than what we've been dealing with. A big benefit for us is that we can provision servers at the main data center, which is across the street from our offices, without having to go over there at all physically. This is true for the server group and the networking group. Also on the networking side, we're getting to a point where we're not going to have to cable anything anymore. Any changes can be made virtually without buying cables or switching ports. That's all gone.

Can UCS help you get new casinos up and running faster?

Bryan Miles: Definitely. With the Gun Link property which we will help to manage, we're looking at a physical hardware deployment of a Unified Communications System in a couple of hours versus a week under the old system. We are probably going to be able to deploy everything for everybody and the slot and server guys will probably never have to visit the site.

In general, things are getting smaller and smaller. My networking team is very small compared to teams in the rest of the casinos in town, but we probably have one of the largest networks out here considering how many different properties we maintain. So it's not just consolidation from a technology point of view, it's consolidation from an operations point of view.