48 Indian Gaming April 2008

John Gage, one of the original founders of SUN Microsys-tems, proclaimed more than a decade ago, the phrase “The

Network is the Computer.” This is one of those rare vision statements that have become truer over time. It seems like amore apt phrase for the gaming industry would be somethinglike “The Game is the Network.”

Most of the vendors in the casino management systemarena are transitioning towards an Internet Protocol (IP) basedcasino management system. Some of the trends we are seeingin the market are:

• The planning has begun to move to server based gaming. Harrah's Entertainment recently announced plansto install 60,000 IGT server based LCD machines in its casinos. These touch screen LCD displays will attach to slotmachines and link to a network that tracks play, advertisespromotions, and dispenses rewards. Harrah's is definitelydriving down the path of server based gaming. This willforce other operators to adopt it or be at a competitive disadvantage with enticing ROI possibilities. The crucialinfrastructure that needs to be in place to make this happen is a highly scalable and reliable network.

• Bally Technologies’ new products, the Power Winners™ and Power Bonusing™, leverage the networkto build excitement on the slot floor. The system can be programmed so that when one player hits a jackpot, otherguests playing in the area get rewarded as well. This happensinstantaneously on a high speed network backbone.

• Moving to server based gaming or network centric gaming network will put higher demands on the businessintelligence systems and customer relationship manage-ment systems. More and more demands will be placed onthe network to move data back and forth. The full poten-tial of these technologies cannot be realized withouthaving a good network infrastructure in place.

Casino Traffic PatternsOne of the keys to operating casino networks successfully is

to understand the nature of the traffic that is generated on thenetwork by the applications that are running in the enterprise.

Understanding traffic patternsThe first key in understanding the traffic patterns on the

network is to find out what kind of traffic is on the network tostart with. It would be wise to determine where this is being generated from and where it is going to. The size of the trafficpackets will give an indication of the bandwidth requirement andsubsequent sizing of the infrastructure. The traffic generated

during each hour of the day will give an indication on how tostructure the application to utilize the network infrastructure efficiently and effectively.

Effects of Unicast/Broadcast/Multicast trafficEach of the three protocols listed above have different

network and traffic characteristics. For example, broadcasttraffic is a transmission sent from a slot server to more than oneslot machine that is IP enabled. Unicast traffic is a transmis-sion sent from the slot server to one slot machine. Most of theenterprise communication is accomplished this way. Multicasttraffic is similar to broadcast traffic except that the traffic goesto the group of devices that subscribes to it. It is essential todetermine how your slot machines communicate with yourbackend server infrastructure. If it uses the broadcast mecha-nism, then care should be taken to alleviate any network performance problems. Using routers to create subnets tolimit broadcast traffic could be a solution. If the slot commu-nication is based on Multicast protocol, then care should betaken to properly design the infrastructure so that duplicatepackets or delay is not introduced into the network.

Factoring multimedia trafficWith IGT's NextGen™ technology and Bally's iVIEW™

technology, among others, lots more than slot traffic is beingpushed to the slot machines and slot players. There is capabil-ity in these devices to do video streaming. This will requireintensive bandwidth requirements and care should be taken todesign the network appropriately to handle this load.

Casino Network Design ElementsThe network design elements are gathered from best

practices when building enterprise networks. Most of thehighly trafficked web sites follow these principles where uptimedirectly equates to revenue gained or lost. These design prin-ciples are as critical when designing a casino network as it isto an enterprise network.

Network reliability and resiliencyThe degree of redundancy you want to build into your

network depends on how critical the network is to your operation and how much down time the business can handle. The least cost method is to have component redundancywhere in you keep a spare of the critical components requiredto keep your operation running in house. If a component fails, thedown time will be limited to the time it takes to configure the sparecomponent and put it back in service. The second level of redun-dancy is the server level redundancy where the servers are running in a clustered or other high-availability configuration.Upon failure of one of the servers, the other server takes over

It’s All About the Network:Why a Good Network Foundation is Critical forOperations and Business Agility

by Ram Patrachari

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

April 2008 Indian Gaming 49

the function of keeping the slot server running, automaticallyminimizing the down time to the switch over time. If there is afailure on the network side, network link redundancy can helprecover the network seamlessly. Protocols like the spanningtree protocol or Cisco's HSRP (Hot Standby Router Protocol)protocol can be used to accomplish this type of redundancy.

Setting up traffic prioritiesIf your casino network is carrying many kinds of traffic, the

traffic has to be analyzed and priorities have to be set for eachkind of traffic. Some of the traffic that youmight see on your network include: slottraffic, server traffic, authentication traf-fic, keep alive's, exchange, Internet, fileaccess, print access, FTP, POS traffic.

Tim Szigeti and Christina Hattingh intheir End-toEnd QoS Network Designbook suggest the following. A basic queu-ing policy could be as follows for a casinonetwork:

• Real-Time (<= 33 percent)– Examples: Slot communication

• Critical Data– Customer data

• Best-Effort (25 percent)– Reports

• Scavenger/Bulk (<5 percent)– Cleanup and other low priority

routines

Other characteristics that might beof interest are to find if the high priority data traffic is intermittent orconstant. With reference to a gamingnetwork the slot traffic from the game tothe backend is intermittent and can peakduring busy periods like weekends andholidays. A sustained traffic can be seenif end of day processing is being done onthe system or multiple reports are beingrun to gather similar kinds of data.

Addressing security issuesThe National Indian Gaming

Commission (NIGC) last year publisheda security measures advisory that listedthe following vulnerabilities with serverbased gaming networks and suggested implementation measures.

• Open and uncontrolled network connections

• Lack of sufficient auditing mecha-nisms

• Network availability

• Lack of security incident response plans and procedures

• Lack of secure upgrade mechanisms and procedures

Even though the advisory was for server based gaming net-works, it can be applied to any IP based gaming network. Someof the measures that should be implemented to ensure a secureand reliable gaming environment are:

• Implement policies and procedures to secure access tothe network and servers.

April 2008 Indian Gaming 51

• Ensure that there is sufficient authentication mecha-nism before allowing users on the network or access toserver resources.

• Implement a policy of least privilege that is needed todo a job function. Any kind of elevated level of privilegeshould be restricted to designated users or processes foras short duration as possible and reverting back to theiroriginal access privileges.

• Implement an intrusion detection system (IDS) toprovide notification in the event of anattack or unauthorized access.

• Implement access control and policiesin each layer of the OSI (Open SystemsInterconnection) model

Designing for change and growthOne of the major challenges when

designing a casino network today is planning for network change and growth. Network build outs and replacement cyclesare generally longer than the typical serverreplacement cycles of three to four years.If you are in a replacement cycle now, thechallenge would be to project five yearsahead to see what is on the horizon andhow to size the network now. One of theindicators for right sizing your networkmay come from analysis of the traffic in thecurrent network. A second source of net-work change and growth might come withgrowth in applications. Are you planningon deploying a new casino managementsystem in the next 3 years? Are you

planning on implementing a customerrelationship management system in thenext three years? Is it going to be sharingthe network with the gaming systems?How about multimedia and streamingapplications to the slot machines? All thesefactors will influence the way you designand build your network for scalability.Analyzing the portfolio of intended offer-ings over the coming years will provide youwith a basis for starting your analysis.

As you can see the time to reengineeror implement a state of the network isright now. You will be ahead of the curveand will have options to react instanta-neously to change in market conditions orreact to competitive pressures. The rapidchanges that you are seeing on the casinofloor will only accelerate as time goes by.Edward de Bono said, “In the future,instead of striving to be right at a high cost,

it will be more appropriate to be flexible and plural at a lowercost. If you cannot accurately predict the future then you mustflexibly be prepared to deal with various possible futures.” Thisis an apt phrase for what the gaming industry is going throughright now and how to position for the future! ¨

Ram Patrachari is Director of Network/Telecomm at ViejasEnterprises managed byViejas Band of Kumeyaay Indians. He can be reached by calling (619)659-1838 or emailrpatrachari@viejas.com

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY