Rank Group PLC Upgrades IT Infrastructure Across 50+ Venues With StarWind Virtual SAN, No New Hardware Required

CHALLENGE

With a portfolio of over 130 venues, Rank Group, the largest casino operator and the second largest bingo operator (by venue count) in Great Britain, relies on high-speed, secure transfers of large data volumes 24/7. Before StarWind, all these processes were served by an IT infrastructure consisting of physical servers, racks, equipment, and a virtualized environment.

The VMware vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) was retired by the vendor, and VMware vSAN wasn’t an option due to the need to upgrade the hardware. A solution was required to provide high-speed, faulttolerant, large data handling capability with the ability to scale when and where necessary.

StarWind technology provides a highly available storage cluster with minimal server requirements. We were really pleased with the engagement process, support during and after migration, and being a part of successful solution delivery.

Craig Prosser, Head of IT Infrastructure

SOLUTION

When the time came to find a new failover solution for their gambling venues, Rank Group knew where to look as they were already using StarWind solutions in their corporate locations.

StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) has been deployed on the existing servers, which meant that Rank Group’s primary concern spending the IT budget on additional equipment and upgrading hardware was eliminated. The company avoided increasing its hardware footprint in venue locations, because there was no need to buy new equipment and accommodate it in sometimes, space-constrained comms rooms.

With StarWind Virtual SAN, Rank Group’s IT infrastructure achieved constant uptime, maximum bandwidth, and fault tolerance for 50+ locations without the extra cost of buying new hardware.