EMC Helps Optimize the Guest Experience at MGM MIRAGE Properties

Captures Player Activity and Guest Information For Real-Time Customer Appreciation, Point Redemption System

Hopkinton, Mass.-Tuesday, August 22, 2006, EMC Corporation, the world leader in information storage and management, today announced MGM MIRAGE, one of the world’s premier hotel and gaming companies, upgraded its EMC information infrastructure to better monitor and manage customer activity to offer real-time appreciation services.

Thomas Peck, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer for MGM MIRAGE, said: “The massive volume of customer data we generate across our hotels and casinos is critical to ensuring our guests have the best experience possible. Members of our Players Club, for example, accrue points for playing slots and gaming tables at MGM MIRAGE’s properties and can redeem those points for cash and complimentary services across our venues. This is state-of-the-art technology that supports our efforts to provide our guests with the optimal entertainment experience. As we have continued to expand our network of properties and attract new guests, our information repositories have grown dramatically.”

To support its information lifecycle management strategy and manage its information explosion, MGM MIRAGE moved to a more robust, centralized EMC storage infrastructure to make its data rapidly and reliably available. In addition, the EMC storage network provides advanced fiber connectivity to ensure access and replicate large volumes of data across multiple data centers.

As the first step in this upgrade, MGM MIRAGE hired EMC Global Services to migrate 100 terabytes of data from its older EMC systems to the high-capacity, high-performance EMC Symmetrix® DMX3000 storage area networks (SANs). In order to minimize any impact to the 150 servers and more than 14,000 users in the enterprise, EMC Global Services used EMC SRDF business continuance software to migrate this data. Today, MGM MIRAGE stores its most critical customer-facing applications – including its Players Club databases, hotel systems and point-of-sale databases and its enterprise SQL system, which consists of more than 120 individual databases – on the Symmetrix DMX3000 SANs housed in its three main data centers.

Laura Fucci, MGM MIRAGE’s Chief Technology Officer, said: “EMC Symmetrix technology gives us the flexibility and scalability we need to manage the rapidly growing stores of real-time customer information we are accumulating. EMC ControlCenter® storage management software has also helped ensure smooth and non-disruptive growth by allowing us to manage our dispersed storage environment centrally and cost -efficiently. In only two years, we’ve been able to expand our infrastructure from 70 to over 300 terabytes without adding staff to manage the allocation of those resources.”

MGM MIRAGE also upgraded its fiber network with additional WDM (wave division multiplexing) platforms from Ciena Corporation. These platforms expand the capacity of MGM MIRAGE’s network to provide additional bandwidth in support of the growth in network services, and in particular to provide resilient connectivity between its multiple data centers and key properties. MGM MIRAGE uses EMC SRDF software along with the Ciena solution to continuously replicate stored information from one data center to another as a safeguard in the event that operations at one of the sites or a portion of the network are disrupted.

Fucci said, “The front doors to our properties are always open to our guests, so there is very little tolerance for downtime. We found EMC to be a good partner because they understood the 24/7 requirements of our industry. With our high availability architecture and EMC’s technology, we’ve improved our ability to recover from a major data center failure from days to two hours. We now have a resilient data center ring so that even if we did have a fiber cut along the network, we would still maintain a very rapid recovery with no data loss.”

MGM MIRAGE has added a fourth data center housing a Symmetrix DMX3 SAN to consolidate the IT infrastructure of the former Mandalay Resort Group, which was acquired by MGM MIRAGE in 2005. The new SAN functions as another node on the SRDF/Ciena data center ring.

“EMC scaleable storage and software solutions are enabling a smooth transition as we consolidate Mandalay’s disk-on-server IT infrastructure into our enterprise SANs,” said Fucci.

MGM MIRAGE has adopted information lifecycle management by using a multi-tiered 300-terabyte EMC storage infrastructure to address the diverse performance and availability needs of its various customer-facing and back office applications. The company deploys EMC CLARiiON® CX fibre channel and ATA disk, as well as EMC Centera™ content-addressed storage and EMC Celerra® network-attached storage (NAS) systems. MGM MIRAGE also utilizes EMC SRDF®, EMC TimeFinder®, EMC PowerPath®, ControlCenter and EMC Navisphere® software solutions to protect and manage its information storage.

About EMC

EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) is the world leader in products, services and solutions for information management and storage that help organizations extract the maximum value from their information, at the lowest total cost, across every point in the information lifecycle. Information about EMC’s products and services can be found at www.EMC.com.
For more on EMC news, events, and recent media coverage visit the news section of EMC.com. Note to editors: For further information about this release contact EMC Public Relations at pr@emc.com

EMC, Symmetrix, CLARiiON, Celerra, EMC ControlCenter, Navisphere, PowerPath, SRDF, and TimeFinder are registered trademarks of EMC Corporation. Centera is a trademark of EMC Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.

Contact Information

Patrick Cooley

Press Contact

EMC Corporation

Contact via E-mail