Resorts World at Sentosa unleashes power of virtualisation
ConvergenceAsia staff
24/08/2009

Resorts World at Sentosa (RWS) is putting into place a comprehensive network built primarily with equipment from Cisco, a leading supplier of networking equipment and network management, which will serve as a platform for the resort’s integrated operations when it opens next year.

Spanning 49 hectares and comprising six hotels, a casino, Universal Studios Singapore and three other large theme parks, in addition to a corporate office and data centre, RWS requires a sophisticated technology and communications setup that will rely on the intelligence of the network to support high-levels of availability, security, and reliability.

“We are essentially building an IT infrastructure for a small city so we needed a robust and mission-critical network platform. We have more than 40,000 network points which means we need a network that can handle that level of magnitude as well as be flexible enough for us to scale up when necessary,” said Yap Chee Yuen, senior vice president of information technology at Resorts World Sentosa.

“Cisco has the track record and the breadth and depth of networking solutions that suited our needs. We also really liked the environment-friendly nature of the solution that will help lower our carbon footprint as well as lower our energy costs,” he added.

The Cisco architecture includes virtualisation and energy-conscious capabilities incorporated in Cisco data centre, routing, switching, and network security solutions. RWS will use the Cisco unified computing solution to orchestrate all forms of communication and collaboration across its data centre to unleash the power of virtualisation by aggregating storage, computational and network resources, operating systems, and applications, in a unified, shared resource pool linked with an intelligent unified fabric. This will then be optimised for users across the entire organisation and will dynamically respond to rapidly changing business requirements.

Cisco EnergyWise, a feature of Cisco Catalyst switches, provides real-time, granular measurement capabilities to give chief information officers better visibility into energy savings across an entire organisation as well as specific places in the network such as the campus, branch office and data centre.

This is a landmark deployment in Singapore because of the scale and complexity of RWS’ requirements. Cisco’s ability to use the intelligence of the network to solve a lot of that complexity is a very powerful proposition for RWS, said Chris Khang, vice president, Asia Pacific, Cisco.

“The network will help to solve many of its challenges as well as give RWS the confidence to deploy innovative applications and services.”

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