Caesars Entertainment Upgrades to VS-HCI Series to Improve the Customer Experience

Caesars’ uncompromising focus on compliance, operational excellence and fraud reduction requires a video surveillance solution that mitigates risk, system vulnerabilities, and enhances the customer experience. The company previously leveraged a legacy CCTV system, consisting of analog cameras and DVRs, but sought to transition to a more reliable, capable, and flexible solution.

As the organization embarked on its video security upgrade, Caesars’ IT and surveillance leaders quickly realized they would need a robust, flexible, and scalable storage solution that would protect video, allow the organization to stay in compliance with gaming regulations, provide the utmost resiliency, and ensure high levels of performance to meet evolving corporate standards. They quickly found that Quantum’s VS-HCI functionality far exceeded the capabilities of standard servers or DVRs, which were never designed to handle the demands of today’s advanced security and surveillance technologies. The Caesars team also had strict requirements when it came to software for video storage solutions. “We wanted the hardware to be as industry standard as possible. Historically, we’ve had various NVR and DVR solutions that sit on custom pieces of equipment made by their particular manufacturers,” said Charles Rayer, IT Director, Caesars Entertainment EMEA. “The magic isn’t in the hardware, the magic is in the software. The Quantum hyperconverged platform provides intelligent software capabilities on standard hardware, and that is a real advantage to the Quantum approach.”

An Enterprise-Class Solution to Protect Video Assets
Caesars required an enterprise-class storage platform that could protect its video investment. Video data needs to be as strongly protected as any other sensitive corporate and IT data, Rayer noted. Quantum VS-HCI is well-suited for this task because the technologies are proven within the rigorous confines of the IT world. Quantum VS-HCI surveillance solutions also provide industry-leading resiliency. Even if multiple hardware failures occur, including an entire appliance, video management servers will remain online and recording, and any previously recorded video will continue to be protected and accessible. “At first, we were wary of the promise of resiliency, but after we had the opportunity to test drive the system and talk to other customers, we quickly realized that this was not just marketing promises,” Rayer said.

Updating Multiple Venues to Simplify Operations and Increase Scalability
Caesars updated six venues with Milestone and Quantum VS-HCI in 2017, with plans to complete additional upgrades the same year. The sites vary in size but incorporate anywhere from 75 to more than 200 video surveillance cameras. Per gaming regulations, Caesars maintains 31 days of video retention and on average has four nodes and 70 TB of storage per site.

As IT becomes a greater force in the world of security, Caesars continues to evaluate how HCI streamlines business processes. The software-defined environment removes the need for dedicated, complex, and proprietary hardware that once required dedicated teams to manage. Incorporating this approach has lowered costs and decreased complexity, while increasing the ability to scale. Additionally, the Caesars team now has the capacity to better adapt to new technology and find new ways to use video data to boost productivity, reduce loss and enhance safety.

“Overall, the Quantum solution is a vast improvement over what we had previously,” Rayer stated. “Our surveillance team trusts in the fact that it will protect our video data and gives us the opportunity to expand into other datacenter workloads in the future. That level of peace-of-mind is highly valuable and impressive in today’s sophisticated gaming environment.”