"We're not a bank with properties spread throughout the state, our business is confined on this site. If this building were to cease to exist we wouldn't have a business to recover," said Waugh.
Business continuity, on the other hand, is extremely important. Sydney's Star City casino complex houses a 500-room hotel, apartments, two theatres, seven restaurants, a nightclub and a convention centre, and keeping these diverse services operating leads to a strong focus on business continuity planning and execution, according to Waugh.
"My main thing is to keep the business running if there's an isolated problem," said Waugh. "Make sure the people we support can service their customers seamlessly."
He gave the example of a fire in the computer room. There would still be a gaming floor packed with people and 450 hotel rooms that needed to be serviced, and it is the job of the IT department to make sure the network can work around outages or disruption.
These issues were key to a recent network upgrade.
Waugh added another computer room to the entertainment complex, and installed Passport 8600 Ethernet routing switches in each room linked by a gigabit Ethernet line, to spread the core network. Waugh was attracted to the ability of the selected Nortel network to reconfigure around a problem in the system in a sub-second time frame.
The new network also improves the operations of the casino, according to Waugh, who said that due to the many specialised requirements of the hospitality business, it differed from other sectors, such as manufacturing. For example, a hotel may require a multitude of systems to deliver and track the range of services it provides its guests, whereas a manufacturing plant may have a much more limited system requirement to deliver its operations.
"Some of the applications we run are a little bit less stable," said Waugh, diplomatically. "If they don't have very robust connections we experience problems."
Star City expects to finish the network upgrade this year, and is looking to introduce wireless handheld terminals at the restaurants in the complex.
