SGI Technology Delivers Real-Time Casino Management

Konami Gaming, maker of player tracking software for the ubiquitous banks of slot machines and other games that greet visitors in America's casinos, relies on compute and storage technology from SGI to deliver real-time player feedback and casino management tools.

Konami has installed 17 Casino management systems with embedded Oracle 9i Database across the United States in US Casinos.

All of Konami's sites - those with 300+ slot machines - run on SGI high-performance computing hardware.

Konami plans to install at least seven more solutions based on SGI technology in the near future.

All but three of the SGI hardware sites are running on SGI Altix 350 servers. The other three are running on SGI Origin 3200 systems, but will soon be migrated to the SGI Altix platform.

The one-armed bandit, a familiar electromechanical icon of casino gaming, has long since gone electronic, and slot machines now brim with possibilities, challenges, and feedback. Players insert an ID card, and the system not only tracks their bets, but prompts them about incentives and promotions. The same system tracks the play at other gambling venues - tables, Keno, Sports book, Bingo - so that the random I/O traffic through a typical 2,000-slot casino's player tracking system can reach millions of transactions per day. Running 24/7 without a break, the Konami Casino Management System (KCMS) on the SGI and Oracle platforms is tracking carded and uncarded game play and constantly updating every gamer's data trail. While Konami Gaming isn't the only company making player tracking software, it is the only company that can provide personalized real-time responses during every game. That capability, embodied in KCMS, is powered by the SGI Altix server and SGI InfiniteStorage TP9300 and TP9500 systems.

"One of the big reasons why Konami continues to use SGI systems is that we may do millions of transactions a day at a casino," said Tom Soukup, Senior Director of R&D, Konami Gaming Inc. "It's a multitude of small transactions and random I/O-much like a small bank. We recently benchmarked a system from another vendor that was preferred by a customer. Real-time performance and I/O were terrible. The SGI InfiniteStorage TP9300 and TP9500 Fibre Channel disk subsystems that we use in our solutions can handle the random I/O extremely well. And unlike subsystems from some other vendors, we can configure them ourselves."