Holland Casino Opts for Dell Compellent

Holland Casino has replaced its HP EVA storage system with a Dell, Inc.‘s storage solution.

The company now benefits from a IT platform for
business processes in addition to 75% 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 with existing infrastructures by supporting both
iSCSI and FC.

Holland Casino’s 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 cost savings as 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 fewer tier one disks are
required than was previously necessary, reducing Holland Casino’s spend on high-performance
drives by up to 75%.

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 start-up 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 24×7, 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 Compellent Enterprise Manager he now needs only two hours instead
of the previous 200 hours to perform maintenance tasks.

Lammers’ favorite part of the new system is the Compellent Copilot Support
with its proactive approach to avoiding system disruption. 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.

"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."