Launching a $200 million casino complete with operating IT infrastructure is a tall order. Yet the IT industry has advanced to the degree that the blueprint for one existing network can be the basis for repeating a successful IT environment and network management practices at new locations.

For the United Auburn Indian Community in Placer County, Calif., the plan to open a casino operation was seen as an engine to fund educational and healthcare needs, contribute to environmental conservation, and help support local police and fire services. But the next step, designing a casino facility with its requisite, integral IT infrastructure and then establishing ongoing business management processes was problematic.

Unlike much bigger, ostentatious casinos already operating in the United States, Thunder Valley Casino's project-team concluded it was impractical to develop and sustain a private enterprise network on their own. Their review of the complexities and costs of planning this new enterprise from scratch provided a revealing look at the challenges and crucial decisions facing them on several levels, beginning with designs for the casino, building itself.

More fundamental still was defining and establishing the various processes that casino guests see, such as player rewards and the guest services kiosks; plus many other behind-the-scenes processes that are necessary for operating the casino, such as table collections, business accounting, employee records, and so on.

Tribe officials overcame all this by basing their business and corresponding IT investments on a model that was already successfully working and compatible for their particular niche in the market. Tribe officials leveraged Nevada-based Station Casinos' successful IT "blueprint" and IT group to oversee the design, finance, and October 2002 construction of the Thunder Valley Casino. Casino operations, which were turned on shortly before the casino opened just 10 months later, continue to be operated and managed remotely by Station Casinos' IT group from their operations center near Las Vegas. Behind their thinking for this facility - which employs 1,100 to provide class II/III gaming (bingo, video gaming, and card tables), several restaurants, gift shop, and offices and support facilities that are all devoted to hosting thousands of guests per day - were cost and security.

Look at this from Station Casinos' perspective. Taking the so-called blueprint of our existing infrastructure and casino operations and using it as the basis for repeating the business success for Thunder Valley Casino is one story. But there's another story, one about evolving an initial set of IT operations. It comprises management practices and service management tools, so that we could equip for the additional role of providing outsourced IT management for the Thunder Valley Casino. Up to that point, Station Casinos' 11 sites and facilities were essentially managed locally, complemented with centralized corporate consoles.

The task now was not simply cloning an entire casino facility, the network infrastructure, and business processes, but operating the enterprise itself, remotely. This meant replicating the daily IT operational procedures and leveraging the expertise of one support staff to cover a distant site.

One of the first tasks that Station Casinos' IT group needed to accomplish before using its existing business and management environment as a model and IT blueprint for the new casino was to evaluate the overall "transferability," Going back to Station Casinos' original solution requirements, one key provision was to ensure the longevity of the infrastructure. By committing to service management best practices that are formalized ITSMF (IT Service Management Forum) in its IT Infrastructure Library (TTIL), we had positioned Station Casinos' properties to be able to phase in additional services in the future in a straightforward manner. This meant that two years after reengineering and deploying Station Casinos' business enterprise and service management systems we were well positioned to both enhance and extend the existing service management infrastructure, and thereby provide remote operation and management for the Thunder Valley Casino.

Pre-existing service management processes were built around HP Open View Network Node Manager and Operations for Windows. These were supplemented by Remedy's Help Desk solution so operations staff had complete monitoring and response capabilities.

"One of the key technology hurdles that Station Casinos IT group had to resolve was how to organize user information and resources while also being able to securely share the information over the network to Station Casinos' central operations. Best practices were a constant theme in Station Casinos' approach to remote management," noted Harold Wong, Microsoft's technology specialist to Station Casinos. "They took advantage of Active Directory, the built-in management capabilities of group policies and integration with other Microsoft and partner management technologies to implement a complete management solution for desktops and servers."

The Microsoft Web site reports how customers can "extend the built-in functionality and core capabilities of Microsoft Operations Manager with a wide range of non-Microsoft solutions." For example, we noted the Web site describes HP OpenView Service Desk works with Microsoft Operations Manager 2000 to deliver integrated service management. The particular combination of partner technologies we considered, Microsoft Active Directory and HP Open View Operations for Windows, were anticipated for similar advantages in helping us streamline remote operations management according to service level objectives as well as supporting helpdesk, incident/problem notification, change management, and service management processes supported on Windows 2000.

"One of the keys to the IT management success at the Thunder Valley Casino," said Wong, "is that Microsoft and HP both committed to ITSM standards, specifically its ITIL, as a best practice approach to service management. This was the basis for an excellent partnership and management solution that truly benefits Station Casinos on a real-time basis."

Station Casinos' IT group undertook a number of steps enhancing operation of Active Directory. For one, managing it through HP Open View Operations for Windows has advantages in terms of being proactive. "The approach equips Station Casinos," observed Rich Bruso, HP's technical representative, "for monitoring and synchronizing operational activities; that is, services, performance counters, event logs, and WMI of key Microsoft Active Directory resources. Moreover, the Active Directory Service Map leverages the Service Map of HP OpenView Operations for Windows to display for operators at the console a clear view of the entire Active Directory environment."

Operators can also display similarly helpful overviews of connections, domain naming, and the schema master, all of which contribute to overall security, performance, and reliability.

Employees use the PC to do their work, but the PC cannot be used for anything not defined in the group policy. Users cannot, for example, access the C drive in order to load unauthorized programs or inadvertently delete important files. Nor can an employee access the Internet if that is not required to do his job.

New Viewpoint

This changes the way employees view their desktop systems, of course, decreasing their sense of proprietorship. Yet, it also means there are significantly fewer things users can do that cause their system to malfunction. Obviously, there is a direct, very favorable effect on support costs and this aspect is especially critical when so many desktops must be remotely managed.

Station Casinos took this concept of security-consciousness even further, and planned to set up Thunder Valley's systems so that no transactional data is stored locally on the desktop. Data is always stored on central servers, which in turn are backed up and mirrored constantly using the latest SAN technology from EMC Corp. Active Directory also provides a central repository of user information such as passwords and permissions, which enables our concept of the "disposable desktop."

Let's say a problem occurs on a desktop PC with our IT design. It can be immediately exchanged for another one that is configured identically to the first. The employee resumes his tasks at once and support doesn't have to worry about retrieving important files, resetting passwords, or restoring to a previous day.