Thomas Peck, senior vice-president and CIO for MGM Mirage, says: The massive volume of customer data we generate across our hotels and casinos is critical to ensuring that our guests have the best experience possible. Members of our Players Club, for example, accrue points for playing slots and gaming tables at MGM Mirages properties, and can redeem those points for cash and complementary services across our venues. This is state-of-the-art technology that supports our efforts to provide our guests with the optimal entertainment experience. As we have continued to expand our network of properties and attract new guests, our information repositories have grown dramatically.
 
To support its information lifecycle management strategy and manage its information explosion, MGM Mirage says that it moved to a more robust, centralised EMC storage infrastructure to make its data rapidly and reliably available. In addition, the EMC storage network aims to provide advanced fibre connectivity to ensure access and replicate large volumes of data across multiple data centres.
 
As the first step in this upgrade, MGM Mirage hired EMC Global Services to migrate 100 terabytes of data from its older EMC systems to the high-capacity, high-performance EMC Symmetrix DMX3000 storage area networks (SANs). In order to minimise any impact to the 150 servers and more than 14 000 users in the enterprise, EMC Global Services used EMC SRDF business continuance software to migrate this data.

Today, MGM Mirage says that it stores its most critical customer-facing applications including its Players Club databases, hotel systems and point-of-sale databases and its enterprise SQL system, which consists of more than 120 individual databases on the Symmetrix DMX3000 SANs housed in its three main data centres.
 
MGM Mirage has also upgraded its fibre network with additional WDM (wave division multiplexing) platforms from Ciena Corporation. These platforms are intended to expand the capacity of MGM Mirages network to provide additional bandwidth in support of the growth in network services, and in particular to provide resilient connectivity between its multiple data centres and key properties.

MGM MIRAGE uses EMC SRDF software along with the Ciena solution to continuously replicate stored information from one data centre to another as a safeguard in the event that operations at one of the sites, or a portion of the network, are disrupted.