In an era where technological advances are frequent and customary, the news that that Global Cash Access (GCA) has embarked on a massive infrastructure and data center upgrade is no real surprise.
GCA is a widely used and well-known company in the gaming world, providing technology that helps responsible casino patrons access cash via ATM, debit card, check cashing and credit card cash transactions for their casino entertainment. In fact, according to the company’s vice president of information technology, Jim King, two-thirds of all the money gambled in a casino is dispensed from GCA ATMs and kiosks.
“In the U.S., Bank of America processes more transactions than anybody else,” King explained. “GCA is in the top three in number of transactions processed daily. What’s amazing about that is the fact that our niche is strictly the casinos. We issue just as much money as the ‘big boys.’”
King also added that by the time we were done with our interview for this article, GCA would have dispensed about $500,000. Last year, GCA dispensed $24 billion to casino guests.
“We have millions upon millions of transactions happening every day on our network,” King said. “It’s a huge responsibility, not just to our casino patrons, but to their guests at the casino.”
GCA’s core business relies on technology, and GCA’s continued focus on customer service was the primary reason for the technology upgrade. GCA’s infrastructure was due for an upgrade, and the company saw an opportunity to build a scalable information technology infrastructure that would support its current operations more efficiently and allow for future growth. It was imperative that the technology infrastructure was 100 percent reliable. “If we have a complete outage, that translates to $37,000 a minute that GCA loses,” he said.
The company chose Switch’s Super NAP hosting facility to house their new data center. “We chose Super NAP because of their high availability,” King said. “They guarantee 100 percent uptime, their cooling and electrical efficiencies, along with the fact that their communications network is unmatched in the industry. We looked at our operation from the technology standpoint and realized we wanted to be in a data center that met with the current technology needs and that would also serve our future needs.”
For the equipment component of the technology upgrade, GCA chose networking leader Cisco. After much discussion with several of the company’s partners, King said Cisco was the best option. “They are the industry leader, and have teamed with other technology partners to bring together a comprehensive data center solution,” he said. “They have created a platform that brings all the key components into one system, and it’s optimized to work together.”
The platform King described is a unified computing platform called a Vblock. Vblock combines storage, servers, virtualization, networking, management and compute into one solution from VCE, the Virtual Computing Environment Company, formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware.
This technology allows GCA to store data on virtual servers and optimizes network connections. “To ensure the highest reliability, we have built redundant data centers,” King explained. “We can continually run the systems, and if there’s a failure anywhere in our system, we can failover to the other data center without missing a beat.” The technology is somewhat physical and somewhat virtual. King said the company’s goal is to have the datacenter 35 percent physical and 65 percent virtual. Virtualizing the technology helps reduce operating and capital costs, and improve utilization of computing resources. Virtualization, in computing, is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as a hardware platform, operating system, a storage device or network resources.
There are several benefits to choosing Cisco’s technology, including high reliability, advanced capabilities and features, and delivering operational efficiencies. By using this technology, GCA gained unprecedented scalability and ease of management, freeing engineers for critical projects, saved nearly $800,000 in capital costs, and will ultimately reduce its carbon footprint by several thousand tons. As King said, these different technologies are all available from different companies and they would work just fine, but packaging them all into one resulted in a great cost savings and provided a unified solution that is easy to manage. Another advantage to using packaged technology is that if a problem occurs, there is only one phone number to call and one company to contact.
This technology upgrade reinforces GCA’s promise to customers that transactions at ATMs and kiosks will be fast, reliable and secure. Many patrons don’t realize the number of steps that take place when their card is swiped, and GCA aims to continue to make that transaction fast, secure and reliable. “My hope is that they don’t see anything but a continued high level of service that we’ve always delivered,” King said. “The backbone of this network technology will also allow us to bring other new services to the casinos.”
Another important benefit of this technological upgrade is fueling GCA’s initiative to grow globally. They recently began utilizing satellite technology, allowing casinos in remote areas to connect to the technology. “This network and technology further enables us to be a global company,” King explained. “It allows us to serve other areas of the world and expand our geographical footprint.”
The timeline for this process has been broken down into three phases. Phase I, the design and installation of all of the hardware and network infrastructure, is complete. Phase II will be completed by the end of this calendar year, with the hopes of Phase III being complete by the end of the first quarter of 2012. For a more detailed explanation of this timeline, see the sidebar below.
Through this upgrade, GCA hopes to continue to provide casino guests and the casinos with reliable and secure information and cash transactions.
“We now have a technology foundation that can drive our business goals,” King said. “This is the best way to remain on the leading edge and deliver on our performance, security and availability promises to customers.”
Technology Upgrade Timeline
Phase I
Requirement - Phase I will require an off-site datacenter, the necessary hardware and infrastructure at both the new datacenter and current datacenter.
Solution - Phase I of this three-phase project was accomplished by working with our partners to design our two datacenters utilizing the technology detailed in this article.
Result – Phase I has been successfully completed.
Phase II
Requirement - Phase II will be the migration of all critical servers, applications and communication equipment at the new off-site datacenter. This phase will also ensure that all data is replicated to both locations to ensure 100 percent business continuity.
Phase III
Requirement - Phase III will be the validation of our ability to failover to either datacenter and continue to operate the business and service our customers. Validation will be carried out by conducting a series of tests and scenarios. These test scenarios will be evaluated by internal and external auditors.
Jenessa McAllister is an Associate Editor for Casino Enterprise Management. She can be reached at (701) 293-7775 or editor1[at]aceme.org.
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