Case Study

The Situation

In 2019, Delaware North acquired the Sky City Casino in Darwin in keeping with its strategy to expand its hospitality and gaming portfolio worldwide. As part of its due diligence before the acquisition, Delaware North realised it would need to conduct a major technology upgrade once the casino was under its control.

The majority of the existing infrastructure was nearing its end-of-life and posed a risk in terms of compliance and performance. Delaware North also wanted to bring the casino under its own domain, to ensure consistency with its global operating standards and systems. While the upgrade itself was relatively straightforward, it needed to be done without affecting the casino’s operating hours. For customers, it needed to be business as usual.

The Solution

The first part of the casino’s existing infrastructure that required an upgrade was its server storage, and Brennan IT worked with the business to find and procure a suitable solution.

“Our due diligence confirmed that we would require additional storage and compute capability as an immediate priority. Darwin Sky City Casino had, during the takeover period, purchased an HPE HF20 Nimble SAN. While this solution was of high quality, it wasn’t robust enough for our needs, so we decided to upgrade to an HPE HF40 SAN storage solution instead,” said Witchen.

“From a technology point of view, the HPE HF40 SAN storage solution is also incredibly resilient and high performing, and gives us the compute power we need in a small form factor – with the ability to scale as we need to,” he added. “Plus, in terms of compliance, the HPE solution has the capacity to handle the high load requirements that gaming databases require, and therefore ensures we are meeting necessary regulatory requirements.”

“We recommended the HF40 SAN storage solution because it’s a robust solution that offers speed and efficiency for mixed-workloads, with incredibly rapid responses and better performance than other hybrid arrays,” said Nick Lowther, Business Development Manager at Brennan IT.

“Though the initial HPE HF20 Nimble SAN solution that Sky City had acquired before the takeover wasn’t going to be sufficient to meet Delaware North’s ongoing needs, we were still able to use it as a replication target in the new infrastructure, to ensure high availability,” he added.

The entire project also needed to be completed very quickly – to ensure there was no interruption to the casino’s service during the takeover. “We were certainly working to a tight timeframe, so it was important that we had procured and organised everything we needed to in advance,” said Lowther. “Our early involvement helped ensure that everything was ready to go, and there were no issues,” he said.
“Brennan IT really helped by providing expert advice and guidance us as to the amount of storage and compute we required to meet our needs, as well as procuring the equipment when it was needed,” said Witchen.

“We have dealt with Brennan IT before and have always been impressed by their level of engagement, as well as their people and experience,” he added.