Case study: Data centre monitoring

Tatts Group is one of Australia’s largest lottery and gaming companies, operating the majority of lotteries within Australia as well as wagering, telephone betting and online transactions. Its online transactions make its one of the highest trafficked enterprises in the country.

The nature of the business means that its transactions are all time-critical and that processing must happen in real time. Any downtime of equipment results in the immediate and real loss of income for the company and, because the events are perishable - that is, betting on them can only happen before the event has begun - there is no way for the group to recoup any losses after the fact.

With ageing infrastructure across two data centres, and beginning its journey to move into a new building, Tatts Group was looking to update its software to provide better monitoring and control. With this in mind, it reached out to the market for submissions and conducted its own extensive research in order to find the most appropriate solution. Schneider Electric’s StruxureWare for Data Centres solution was chosen.

The StruxureWare for Data Centres software enables Tatts Group to plan, monitor and effectively operate its sites.

“StruxureWare for Data Centres provides us with the ability to monitor all power from the main switchboard through to individual rack units,” said Tatts Group CTO Matt Maw. “The heat mapping and air flow analysis tools have also allowed us to work on our cooling systems, and as a result we have been able to implement a two-degree rise in our cooling temperatures, which will provide us with significant savings on energy requirements.”

By having a better idea of how the data centre is performing, Tatts Group has also found that it can significantly increase the density of the centre. “Without the tool we would be looking at 15-20% more racks,” Maw said. “This means we have been able to delay a new data centre building by about 2-3 years, giving us significant savings.”

One of the big factors in the success of the software has been the ability to receive live alerts in the event of an incident. “The increased monitoring means that if there is a problem, we can see immediately where that problem is and fix it,” Maw said. “No more manual diagnosis, which tends to be slow and inefficient. We can also see immediately whether there is a problem with the infrastructure or the power, so we know what needs to be done.

“Eighteen months ago we chose Schneider Electric as our strategic partner, and I am happy to say that that faith has been repaid and we have had a lot of success out of the platform that we have engaged in. More importantly, we have a lot more scope within the software that we can continue to turn on and leverage in order to achieve more outcomes. With the guidance of Schneider Electric’s actionable intelligence, we are continuing to grow and improve our position in the industry.”