Marathon and Key Ensure a Winning Game at Aristocrat
everRun ensures continuous availability for multi-casino application in Las Vegas
THE COMPANY
Aristocrat is a manufacturer of gaming hardware and a global leader in the development of software-based sophisticated gaming products for use by casinos around the world. Aristocrat began corporate life in 1953 as a gaming hardware supplier, and has evolved into a gaming technology group that places high value on software and content. Headquartered in Sydney, Australia, Aristocrat has offices in the United States, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Japan, South America and Southeast Asia, where staff are focused on meeting customer needs at a local level. A global management structure drives innovation in all business areas.
THE PROBLEM
Aristocrat had begun to use a new gaming application called Multi-Site Progressive (MSP) System, where slot machine players at casinos around the U.S. are connected, permitting them to play for combined jackpots. The Nevada Gaming Control, the state regulatory agency, requires redundancy in these systems to minimize downtime on the jackpot links.
THE APPROACH
Aristocrat uses an SQL Server 2000 database running on a Windows server to monitor and increase jackpot levels for each slot machine within the MSP. If the database application goes down, the jackpots cannot continue to be managed and the games must be shut off. To protect against such an event, even Aristocrat needed more than a highly available system; they needed continuous availability. The choices that Aristocrat evaluated for server redundancy were Microsoft Clustering and Marathon Technologies everRun software.
THE SOLUTION
Aristocrat selected Marathon everRun software because it offered a zero downtime solution that eliminated the failover process. This was critical to the IT group at Aristocrat, since the back-end database must continue to function for their external gaming machines to operate properly within the MSP. If the database shuts down for any reason, the games lock themselves and are not available to the players. Eventually Aristocrat will have hundreds of sites with potentially thousands of games connected to the MSP System. Any amount of downtime at the database level could have a significant financial impact, as revenue-generating gaming equipment is switched offline.
THE RESULTS
“Key engineers played a significant role in the deployment and worked hand-in-hand with our inhouse engineers to deploy the software successfully,” said Adam Goldstein, Director of Information Technology at Aristocrat. “Since the solution is still very new, we have not reached an ROI point yet. We are looking to expand our deployment of our new MSP product over the next five years and anticipate an ROI within 12 months.”
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