With over 2,493 slot machines, an 18-hole championship golf course, health spa and 200 room luxury-hotel, Cache Creek Casino Resort (“CCCR”) is a leading destination resort in Northern California. CCCR previously worked with INX to virtualize 60 of CCCR’s Intel servers onto seven host servers. In addition to realizing much lower operating costs and benefits such as disaster recovery for all servers, CCCR expects to achieve significant annual energy savings projected to approach $100,000 within a few years. CCCR is further extending the benefits of virtualization by implementing Panologic zero client devices in conjunction with VMware VDI technology in a pilot program to evaluate eliminating PCs.
David Forbes, Operations Manager at CCCR, was recently asked to give a presentation about his virtualized environment to Tribal Net’s annual meeting of Indian Casinos in Scottsdale, Arizona. “We’ve had a great experience working with INX in virtualizing our infrastructure,” said Forbes, “When they suggested we look at virtualizing our desktops, we agreed to a proof-of-concept using the Panologic zero client devices and VMware VDI. The results were impressive – we ran a test with multiple video streaming sites to verify performance and they performed just as well on the Pano as on a regular desktop. Now we’re rolling out more units in an expanded pilot.”
“With many hundreds of desktops remaining to virtualize, CCCR can achieve significant savings, reduce IT labor requirements and improve the user computing experience,” said Steve Kaplan, Vice President of Data Center Virtualization for INX. “Virtualizing desktops also helps with CCCR’s green initiative since the Panologic devices only consume around 4 Watts per hour versus around 20 times that amount for a PC.”
“Desktop virtualization represents an enormous opportunity for organizations such as CCCR,” said Mark Hilz, president of INX. “By virtualizing the desktop and moving it into the data center, organizations are able to slash operating costs while enhancing performance, security and reliability.”
“When we engaged INX to assist us with virtualizing our data center, we were facing some difficult challenges such as a lack of data center space for facilitating our rapid growth,” said Rod Luck, CIO of CCCR. “INX was able to assist us in successfully virtualizing even very large production workloads such as Oracle servers. We’re looking forward to working with them to achieve further energy and other savings by virtualizing our desktops.”