customer profile

Hard Rock Hotel & Casino

Faster, more manageable data backup operations help maintain high-end guest services during major property expansion

Business overviewThe Hard Rock Hotel & Casino is a premier destination entertainment resort located on 16.7 acres in

Las Vegas, Nevada. The property offers an energetic entertaining and gaming experience with the services

and amenities associated with a boutique luxury resort hotel. Built in 1995 and expanded in 2007,

the property features an 11-story Hard Rock Hotel Tower, more than 1,600 guest rooms, and one of

the “Top 10 Pools” in the world, according to the Travel Channel.

ChallengesHard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas is in the midst of a major expansion, with construction underway

to increase its number of guest rooms from 650 to nearly 1,600. At the same time, the resort’s critical

systems, front-line computers, and the property’s 140 plus point-of-sale terminals used to make

reservations for spa treatments and process payments for food, drinks and merchandise, still need to

be up and running.

“Doing a major property expansion while we’re open is kind like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube,”

explained Rob Kosier, director of information technology at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. “We still

need to maintain top-flight guest services even as we periodically shut down certain operations

because of construction. Our old tape backup system made this even more challenging due to

lengthy backup jobs that frequently exceeded the available backup window, which negatively

impacted our production applications.”

Although Hard Rock rotated scheduled backups for multiple systems on alternate days to alleviate

the impact on production systems, growing volumes of data were causing some backups to extend

into the following day, reducing productivity. In addition, Hard Rock’s tape backup systems were

unreliable, requiring manual intervention from the IT teams. And, tape costs were consistently

increasing every month.

As Hard Rock continued to expand, there were many occasions when senior management required

access to Microsoft® Exchange e-mails that often were only stored on tape. To restore them, the IT

department needed to search for the correct tape and initiate a time-consuming restore process.

Because of the many different versions of Exchange in use, the IT Department would occasionally

have to rebuild an out-of-date system. This process could take several weeks depending on current

projects and construction.

EMC solutionAfter a successful proof of concept, Hard Rock Hotel & Casino replaced its Symantec NetBackup and

tape-based systems with EMC® Avamar® disk-based backup, recovery, and deduplication solution.

Hard Rock now uses Avamar to efficiently back up its critical revenue-generating POS system, spa

management files, Microsoft Exchange e-mails, Microsoft SQL Server® database, and other applications.

Avamar protects approximately 60 physical servers and VMware® virtual machines via fast, daily full

backups to a centralized Avamar storage grid. By deploying VMware, Hard Rock consolidated several of

its physical servers into virtual machines running on ESX® servers, which utilize EMC CLARiiON® CX3-40

networked storage.

In addition, Hard Rock uses EMC SourceOne™ Email Management to archive e-mails older than nine

months from its EMC CLARiiON CX3 production system to EMC Centera® for long-term, cost-effective

storage and e-mail legal discovery.

Backup and recovery systemsAvamar has enabled Hard Rock Hotel & Casino’s IT department to efficiently protect critical data via

fast, daily full backups using existing physical and virtual infrastructure. And Avamar integrated

global, source data deduplication technology has reduced required backup disk storage, while fast

single-step recovery reduces the burden on the IT staff.

For example, Avamar integrated deduplication reduced file server backup data by more than 80 percent.

By only sending new, unique sub-file data segments during Avamar daily full backups, Hard Rock’s backup

times have been dramatically reduced from 18-36 hours to just 4-6 hours. Additionally, Microsoft

Exchange backups have been reduced from 12 hours to less than 30 minutes. As a result, backup jobs are

now easily completed within available backup windows without impacting product system performance or

end-user productivity. In addition, data is deduplicated so less storage is required, enabling Avamar’s

daily full backups to be retained for extended periods of time for fast, single-step recovery from disk.

Kosier said, “Basically we’ve gone from a complex system where we would do full backups one day

and incrementals the next to an extremely efficient and simple Avamar solution that provides daily

full backups within available backup windows and speedy one-step recovery when needed.”

Data recovery timeframes have also been dramatically reduced from 3-7 days to just a few minutes.

SummaryArchiving older e-mails to Centera with EMC SourceOne Email Management has helped especially with

the increased number of requests for restored e-mails from Hard Rock’s senior management.

“We’ve saved a ton of time over the last year,” said Kosier. “I do e-mail investigations for senior

management in about five minutes weekly because it’s so much easier to retrieve e-mails on Centera

than on tape.”

“Basically we’ve gone from a complex system where we would do full backups one day and incrementals the next to an extremely efficient and simple Avamar solution that provides daily full backups within available backup windows and speedy one-step recovery when needed.”

Rob Kosier, Director of Information Technology, Hard Rock Hotel & Casino

emc corporationHopkintonMassachusetts01748-91031-508-435-1000In North America 1-866-464-7381www.EMC.com

EMC2, EMC, Avamar, CLARiiON, EMC SourceOne, Centera, and where information lives are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. VMware and ESX are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. Microsoft and SQL Server are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. © Copyright 2010 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 2/10 Customer Profile H4774

VMware and EMC have enabled Hard Rock to keep pace with high data growth rates and facility expansion

without significantly increasing its hardware footprint or adding IT personnel.

“In Las Vegas, everything moves quickly,” commented Kosier. “A 3-year construction project anywhere

else takes half the time here. With EMC, we can be more flexible and responsive to timelines like

these. We were able to get everything moved over to Avamar and our people trained in a week. And it

only takes a few minutes to add a new client—virtual or physical—to Avamar.”

Kosier continued, “Because of this flexibility, our ROI with EMC has been a lot faster than we forecasted.

As we nearly triple the number of rooms on our property, we know our critical data will be available and

protected during this complex transition period and later across a much larger enterprise.”

About EMCEMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world’s leading developer and provider of information infrastructure

technology and solutions that enable organizations of all sizes to transform the way they compete

and create value from their information. Information about EMC’s products and services can be found

at www.EMC.com.