“We reduced our three-year networking total cost of ownership for the new data center by about 50% using a Dell Active Fabric solution. We saved mid-to-high six figures compared to a Cisco solution.” – Trina Gizel, CIO WMS Gaming
Casino gaming has come a long way from watching lemons and cherries spin around in nickel slot machines, hoping for the right fruit to come up. Gaming over the years has become increasingly competitive, with game producers utilizing technology to create engaging and entertaining experiences. WMS Gaming has been applying new technology since the early 40s to arcade, home video, and casino gaming products, delivering a combination of immersive experiences using well-established proprietary Hollywood titles such as Spider-Man, Lord of the Rings, and The Wizard of Oz as well as a number of electronic and digital technologies. Some of the technological firsts they’ve introduced include:
- First community game to use servers to drive community bonuses
- First sensory immersion gaming experience
- First networked gaming app integrated with base theme
- First to integrate casino game play with an online application (Playerslife.com)
- First slot game incorporating a motion chair synchronized with game play
Technological innovation is in WMS Gaming’s DNA, not only in the way they create their games but in the way they run their IT infrastructure. Not willing to settle for business as usual, WMS Gaming wanted an infrastructure that would stretch the capabilities of today’s technology and give them plenty of headroom to grow well into the future. Facing an Oracle upgrade to R12 (54 modules), they decided to skip a short-term fix and build from scratch with the same approach they use to create their products – strategically marrying technology to innovative content, hardware and differentiated platforms/enablers.
Trina Gizel, CIO of WMS Gaming said, “We serve 1,750 users on six continents, and we needed a network and storage infrastructure that would take any performance issues off the table. It also had to scale to support 10 percent annual growth for the next 10 years, because gaming is expanding worldwide, and we’re growing fast.”
WMS Gaming chose Dell Active Fabric (leaf/spine) architecture with the Dell Networking Z9000 fabric switches as the 40GbE spine and Dell Networking S4810 switches as the 10GbE leaf nodes. A converged network solved performance issues due to fiber forcing storage farther away from the front-end host. The outcome has been noticeable and exceptional. WMS Gaming’s investment and gutsy innovation has had a strong payout and they’ve benefited noticeably in the three years since the deployment. Gizel said, “Our converged network has solved that problem. We’ve taken network and storage bottlenecks out of the equation. Performance is just no longer an issue in our world, and that was not the case two years ago.”
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