CASE STUDY
F
or award-winning hospitality and
entertainment company, Peermont
Hotels, Casinos and Resorts, all
components of its business run 24 hours a
day, 365 days a year.
With staff operating in three shifts across its
12 properties, hyper-availability of data and
systems are fundamental to the success of
the business.
“We do not have the luxury of a downtime
window or shutting down over the
weekend for system maintenance,” said
Ernst Karner, Group IT Manager and CIO
of Peermont Group.
“For us, customer service is fundamental and
there are no allowances for not delivering a
round-the-clock value proposition.
“We are always on the go with our business.”
Even though many other organisations have
only recently started embracing the need
to have hyper-available data, Peermont
has been operating in this always-on
environment since it opened its doors more
than two decades ago.
“Historically, backing up and restoring data
was not an easy proposition,” said Karner.
“We had multiple vendors claiming various
features that sounded nice on paper, but the
reality worked quite different. Unfortunately,
no organisation can claim to not have any
downtime or availability issues. The same
can be said for us where drive failures were
quite common in the past.”
Karner says restoring data is always used as
a last resort because of the impact it could
have on live systems.
“Before Veeam, we had a few incidents
where recovery from our backups was
not possible. We did not have the level of
comfort that all our backups (stretching
to more than 500 virtual machines,
275 terabytes of data, and 13 data
centres) were done reliably. At the time,
it was impossible to guarantee the entire
company being recoverable in the event of
a disaster.”
Karner says he understands customer
expectations and feels that it is unforgivable
FOR US, CUSTOMER SERVICE IS
FUNDAMENTAL AND THERE ARE
NO ALLOWANCES FOR NOT
DELIVERING A ROUND-THE-CLOCK
VALUE PROPOSITION.
for systems to go down, irrespective of the
industry a business operates in. For visitors,
things like Internet access (which is provided
free to customers at Peermont properties)
have become a commodity. If Peermont is
unable to deliver this, people start becoming
very unforgiving.
www.intelligentcio.com
“Customers expect to have access to services
at any time of day or night,” said Karner. “As
such, we had to review our capacity across
all spheres of the business (network, disk
storage and compute availability). For us,
there is no such thing as a Plan B. Uptime
is critical and we identified Veeam as our
partner of choice to address our hyper-
availability requirements.”
However, unlike other businesses, Peermont
requires its disaster recovery facilities to
remain onsite due to its unique availability
requirements. If systems go down, there
is an immediate financial impact on the
business. However, it does supplement its on-
premise business continuity strategy with a
hosted component as additional fail-safe. For
example, if central reservations are offline,
no bookings can be made through any
means. Guests will simply choose another
hotel to stay at.
Similarly, if slot machines go down, there is a
real-time impact on revenues. Peermont can
potentially lose considerable gross operating
profit if downtime occurs. Not being available
for two to three hours could therefore be
disastrous to the business bottomline. Beyond
the financial, the reputational damage could
also be significant.
“Customers might forgive you once if systems
are not available, but if this starts becoming
an ongoing concern, they will migrate away
from you to a competitor who can deliver on
their expectations,” said Karner.
Veeam therefore had to provide a strategic
solution that could allay these concerns
and provide Peermont with the peace of
mind needed to deliver continuous services
to customers.
The Veeam solution
As a precursor to implementing Veeam
Availability Suite, Peermont embarked on a
virtualisation journey in 2005. Gradually it
expanded to 70 hosts across the group moving
away from physical business applications. By
improving efficiencies, Peermont can also
keep costs down and run analysis on data to
better understand customer needs.
“We have a centralised data warehouse that
collects information from all our casinos,”
added Karner.
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