Customer Solution Case Study
/ / 800-Gigabyte Data Warehouse Helps MGM MIRAGE Provide Better Customer Service
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Entertainment
Customer Profile
Based in Las Vegas, Nevada, MGM MIRAGEowns and operates 24casino resorts and is one of the largest hotel and gaming companies in the world.
Business Situation
When MGM MIRAGE acquired Mandalay Resort Group, doubling its number of employees and properties, the company needed to ensure that it had the database and infrastructure scalability to meet its growth.
Solution
MGM MIRAGE deployed its enterprise data warehouse with Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) running on the 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows Server® 2003 Enterprise Edition, which ishosted on a 64-bit Unisys ES7000 server with 16 Itanium 2 processors.
Benefits
Better insight into customer activities
Scalability
Performance
Lower total cost of ownershipthan mid-range servers
Server consolidation / “Prior to the warehouse, we were not able to know what our customersweredoing. It was difficult to figure out their total value. Now we can capture all the data to do that.”
Stephen Moore, Vice President of Loyalty Marketing, MGM MIRAGE
MGM MIRAGE solidified its position as one of the world’s largest hotel and gaming companies with its U.S.$7.9 billion acquisition of Mandalay Resort Group—doubling MGM MIRAGE holdings to 24 hotel-casinos. The company needed to ensure that the enterprise data warehouse it used to support its customer loyalty program could scale to support the new properties. MGM MIRAGE succeeded in meeting the scalability demands of the acquisition and gained the ability to scale into the future by using a 64-bit environment. The data warehouse relational database is supported by Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) and the 64-bit version of the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 Enterprise Edition operating system, and is hosted on a Unisys ES7000 computer with 16 Itanium 2 processors and 64 gigabytes of RAM. The solution also helped MGM MIRAGE consolidate servers.
Situation
When MGM Mirage completed its U.S.$7.9 billion acquisition of Mandalay Resort Group in April 2005, it created one of the world’s largest hotel and gaming companies, with U.S.$7 billion in annual revenue, 70,000 employees, and 24 hotel-casinos, including the Bellagio, MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay, The Mirage, Luxor, Excalibur, New York–New York, Monte Carlo, and Treasure Island.
The acquisition doubled the number of properties MGM MIRAGE owns, and also doubled the number of guests the company enrolls in its customer loyalty programs and other initiatives to enhance the customer experience. Such programs are essential to the success of MGM MIRAGE, because of the competitive nature of the hospitality and gaming industry which requires companies to continually improve their accommodations, entertainment offerings, and services—as well as to provide a more personalized customer experience.
Earlier MGM MIRAGE had deployed an enterprise data warehouse to support its customer loyalty programs, based on the 32-bit version of Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Enterprise Edition running on the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 Enterprise Edition operating system. (Both Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000 are part of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software.) The data warehouse proved its value to MGM MIRAGE, and the company later upgraded to SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) and the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, hosted on a Unisys ES7000 computer with eight 64-bit Itanium 2 processors.
As soon as plans were announced for the MandalayBay acquisition, MGM MIRAGE IT staff began planning for the rapid growth of its enterprise data warehouse. Prior to the acquisition, MGM MIRAGE was taking between 12 to 14 hours to build nine data marts from a 750-gigabyte (GB) data warehouse. The company needed to see how well SQL Server and the Windows Server operating system could scale, and whether it could keep the same 12-hour to14-hour build timeframe,despite nearly doubling the size of its data warehouse.
“We knew the acquisition of Mandalay Resorts Group would place increasing demands on our corporate IT infrastructure,” recalls Glenn Bonner, Chief Information Officer at MGM MIRAGE. “We needed to quickly implement new systems in order to consolidate our operations and reduce costs for the company. We face unique challenges in the gaming hospitality industry, and they’re compounded by the fact that we run our operations 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. And our heaviest volumes are on weekends and holidays, when most companies are closed.”
As the MGM MIRAGE IT team planned for doubling its data warehouse, it needed to ensure its solution could:
Scale to meet rapid growth.
Consolidate servers without sacrificing performance.
Provide agility to quickly meet the company's changing needs.
Give a better view into the business.
Reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) through reducing use of IBM AS/400 mid-range systems.
Enhance performance.
Solution
As part of its preparation for the MandalayBay acquisition, MGM MIRAGE visited the Unisys test lab in Redmond, Washington, to experiment with its own data running on the 64-bit versions of both SQL Server 2000 and the Windows Server 2003 operating system running on 64-bit hardware.
“Our 64-bit scalability testing in Redmond demonstrated that we could easily double the size of our data warehouse without slowing our performance,” advisesRussell Nelson, Vice President of Software Engineering at MGM MIRAGE. “The same testing also showed that we could significantly consolidate the number of separate SQL Server computers we had been supporting.”
Continuing to use SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) and the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, MGM MIRAGE upgraded its hardware to a Unisys ES7000 computer with 16 processors and 64 GB of RAM. The ES7000 has two partitions, with eight of the 64-bit Itanium 2 processors dedicated to the data warehouse, and the other eight processors supporting the nine data marts.
Data Warehouse Architecture
The multitier data warehouse functionsinclude:
Extract, Transform, Load. MGM MIRAGE imports data from a number of sources, including applications running on SQL Server 2000 and IBM AS/400 mid-range systems. One key data source is the company’s online transaction processing (OLTP) application created by International Gaming Technology and hosted on SQL Server 2000, which provides data from slot machines and other casino operations. Other significant data sources include applications used in managing hotel systems, food and beverage, and point-of-sale transactions. A third-party extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool is used to import information into the data warehouse and data marts.
Staging.MGM MIRAGE IT staff employ a third-party product for data cleansing and the "match-and-survive"data process. SQL Server stored procedures speed up some ETL processes, as well as manage and apply security roles and permissions.
Data Warehouse. After the MandalayBay acquisition, the data warehouse relational database grew to more than 800 GB, and it is expected to exceed one terabyte in 2006. The database includes more than 34 million customer records and more than 2 billion transaction records. The ETL, staging, and data warehouse relational database run on a single instance of SQL Server 2000, hosted on an eight-processor partition of the ES7000 computer.
Data Marts. The data warehouse solution has nearly two dozen data marts, including marts for each of the 24 MGM MIRAGE properties.
Reporting. A third-party solution provides for reporting against multidimensional cubes. SQL Server Query Analyzer is used for most queries, which are made directly against the relational database by the company’s 95 business analysts who run complex queries with multiple joins.
Storage. Storage is on an EMC CLARiiON CX700 storage area network (SAN) with 14 terabytes of storage.
The company uses SQL Server Transactional Replication and an EMC GeoSpan Cluster to provide a geographically separated system for disaster recovery. The GeoSpan Cluster helps ensure that SQL Server and the primary databases are protected from either a site disaster or server failure. The solution allows for a single instance of SQL Server to perform all backup and maintenance activities for all of the production SQL Servers.
Benefits
Deploying its enterprise data warehouse with a 64-bit environment has provided MGM MIRAGE with a number of benefits including better insight into customer activities, the potential scalability to meet the demands of doubling in size after its acquisition of Mandalay Resort Group, enhanced system performance, a lower total cost of ownership than mid-range servers, and server consolidation.
Better View of the Customer
Deploying its data warehouse with the 64-bit version of SQL Server on the 16-way ES7000 enabled MGM MIRAGE to double the number of properties it supports—without adversely impacting performance. Having information aboutall of its customers in one relational database helps the company to better understandthe people who visit its casinos and what they want, and to more precisely craft promotions to meet their needs.
“The problem that needed to be solved for MGM MIRAGE was how to come up with a way to provide a consolidated view of our customer,” points outNelson. “We needed a mechanism to provide a complete picture of the customer from a perspective of theirvalue. The consolidated data warehouse, with all customer information—gaming and nongaming—in one location, has allowed us to better know our customers and to better serve their needs.”
The data also helps the company gauge the effectiveness and types of promotions offered. “Our marketers can now look at the total promotion expense and our customers' response, and at the total revenue that we’ve made so they can make offers in a more cost-effective and attractive way,” says Stephen Moore, Vice President of Loyalty Marketing at MGM MIRAGE. “Prior to the warehouse, we were not able to know what our customers were doing. It was difficult to figure out their total value. Now we can capture all the data needed to do that.”
Scalability
SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) gave MGM MIRAGE the scalability it needed to accommodate a doubling of its size. “The casino floor typically has about 2,500 individual computer systems,” notes Moore. “Multiply that by 24 properties, and you have some 60,000 computers delivering information to the data warehouse in real time. We believe we have the largest transactional database in the gaming industry. So we are very pleased with the scalability of Microsoft SQL Server.”
“The performance of SQL Server and the ES7000 has been fantastic,” states Tim Frawley, Vice President of Operations at MGM MIRAGE. “The only downtime we’ve had has been scheduled.”
Performance
The 64-bit data warehouse environment is giving MGM MIRAGE a system performance boost, which the company's executives appreciate as the company seeks to make its marketing efforts ever more focused and precisely delivered. Though the size of the data warehouse nearly doubled, MGM MIRAGE was able to remain within the same 12-hour to 14-hour build timeframefor data marts that they had experienced before.
“SQL Server performance has been outstanding,”reports Nelson. “Using SQL Server 2000, we have been able to implement an enterprise data warehouse that gives us the ability to eliminate millions of duplicate customer records from our core database. This provides the company's managers with the information that’s valuable to them in a concise format so that we do not send information to the wrong customer or send it to them multiple times. The process works by taking the information we do have and cleaning it.This eliminates duplicate customer records so that when we send campaigns for marketing, e-mail, and so on, it goes to the right customer, at the right address, and they don’t receive the same message multiple times.”
Faster performance from the 64-bit environment means clean data is available sooner. “We no longer have to wait two or three days for data to be rolled into marketing data marts,” addsNelson. “Data collected during the day gets cleaned up and loaded into the data marts the same night, so that it is available to our marketing people. We’re extremely pleased with the performance improvements and the scalability of Microsoft SQL Server that we’ve enjoyed over the last couple of years.”
Lower TCO than Mid-Range Servers
MGM MIRAGE has enjoyed a lower TCO than it realized by moving applications from IBM AS/400 mid-range systems to a SQL Server–based system, which run on Intel-based platforms such as the ES7000.
“We’ve had a strategy at MGM MIRAGE to use Microsoft Windows Server System for quite a few years,” says Laura Fucci, Chief Technology Officer at MGM MIRAGE. “As you look up and down the Strip in Las Vegas, you see that mid-range systems are the predominant force in Las Vegas. Our experience has been that there’s lower cost of ownership, better performance for your dollar, in a Windows Server environment. So, that’s really been our driving force.”
Fucci values the ease of integration. “Windows Server System is a great enterprise IT environment, because it’s anchored by a strong operating system.We use more than 12 application servers that are wholly integrated, whichenables us to reduce our cost of administration and support,” Fucci explains. “An example of this would be a few years ago, when we went through a refresh of our hotel system. At one property we refreshed the hotel system on a Windows Server environment for about $7,000. At another property it cost nearly a half a million dollars to refresh the hotel system on a mid-range environment. That cost difference alone validated our strategic direction for the Windows Server environment.”
The lower TCO extends to supporting third-party applications.“It’s a lot cheaper to put in a Windows Server than it is to put in an AS/400,” reportsFrawley. “We have a lot of small applications—in fact we support more than 150 applications—and for the database, we use SQL Server. When we need a new application it will cost us a lot less to find an application that runs on Windows Server than it will for an application that runs on an AS/400 or a Tandem.”
Server Consolidation
As MGM MIRAGE expanded its data warehouse solution, it also consolidated the number of computers it had deployed as independent SQL Server databases, helping the company to reduce the administrative time spent managing servers, while improving its agility in accommodating the company’s ever-growing need for database-driven applications.
The company consolidated some 30 computers hosting more than 125 SQL Server databases tothe data warehouse relational database running on a single instance of SQL Server.
The consolidation has also given MGM MIRAGE the ability to more quickly deploy new applications. "We're in a very unique and specialized business,” advisesCharles Shepard, Lead Systems Engineer at MGM MIRAGE. “When someone develops an application that works in our industry, we've got to be in a position to supply the infrastructure for that application. There often aren't other alternatives."
But in a one-server-per-application environment, getting the hardware in, configured, and ready for deployment adds to the time it takes to get new software applications up and running. Server proliferation was costing the organization money and time—and making it tough for IT to be responsive to the needs of the business. The 64-bit architecture gives the IT team the ability to consolidate SQL Server–based applications, thereby reducing operating costs and improving agility.
"The majority of our new applications utilize a SQL Server database,” explainsLee Margulin, Director of Database Administration at MGM MIRAGE. “We can put those new applicationson our enterprise-wide SQL Server platform quickly and economically. That's a very big benefit for us."
"We're reducing costs while improving agility at the same time,” addsFucci. “With our new environment, we're able to implement new applications in 50 percent of the time it used to take."
Looking Ahead to SQL Server 2005
As a company that prides itself on staying on the leading edge of technology to help it provide an ever-better customer experience, MGM MIRAGE is planning an early deployment of SQL Server 2005, thenext-generation data management and analysis software from Microsoft.
“We are always focused on scalability and performance,” observesBonner. “We are eager to take advantage of the enhancements SQL Server 2005 makes in these areas”
The company is also interested in SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services for expanded reporting, SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services for building and managing multidimensional cubes,and in SQL Server 2005 data mining algorithms.
Microsoft Windows Server System