Everpure + PENN Entertainment

How PENN Entertainment eliminated casino floor outages

PENN Entertainment eliminated casino floor outages by standardizing on Everpure across 43 properties, protecting gaming revenue while enabling real-time personalization for millions of guests.

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Challenges

PENN Entertainment operated casinos, racetracks, and hotels with fragmented infrastructure from mergers and acquisitions. A small IT team managed 30,000 VMs and 100,000 database tables while facing strict cybersecurity requirements, regulatory compliance mandates, and the critical need for 24/7 availability—where minutes of downtime could cost millions in lost gaming revenue.

Results

PENN Entertainment reduced floor outages and gained the ability to deliver real-time guest personalization. PENN protects millions in potential revenue loss thanks to non-disruptive, self-service upgrades. Meanwhile, the Everpure platform enables both enterprise and regional IT teams to focus on critical business services instead of storage maintenance.

Storage outages due to upgrades
ZERO
translates directly to protecting gaming revenue

Database tables supported
100,000
across gaming operations

Gaming properties supported
43
across the United States and Canada

Table of Contents

Introduction Standardizing success across the gaming floor Everpure: The enterprise data foundation Enabling innovation in casino technology

Introduction

PENN Entertainment operates entertainment properties across the United States and Canada, including casinos, racetracks, and hotels. For millions of guests, reliable technology is the invisible foundation that makes gaming entertainment experiences possible.

Products

Evergreen//One FlashArray//X Pure1

Solution Areas

Accelerate Core Applications Activate Real-time Analytics

Customer Industries

Media and Entertainment

Location

North America

Standardizing success across the gaming floor

PENN Entertainment operates 43 properties across the United States and Canada, including casinos, racetracks, and hotels. For millions of guests, reliable technology is the invisible foundation that makes gaming entertainment experiences possible.

Craig Turner, Infrastructure Architect at PENN Entertainment, joined five years ago to find a complex web of legacy systems inherited through mergers and acquisitions. The stakes couldn't be higher in an industry where game access directly translates to lost revenue. "With most gaming organizations today, some of the biggest challenges are protecting player data and reliability," explains Turner. "If our systems are down, you can't play a slot machine...That's millions of dollars that we're losing."

PENN's small IT team supported a massive environment spanning 30,000 virtual machines, and 100,000 database tables across their many properties. Combined with strict regulatory compliance and 24/7 operational demands, this created issues. Whenever there was an update, systems could not risk being out of commission. "Having disruptive upgrades or unscheduled outages means uncomfortable conversations with leadership...We were having floor outages. That's not sustainable."

Everpure: The enterprise data foundation

PENN Entertainment standardized on the Everpure platform to simplify their complex infrastructure while meeting gaming industry demands. PENN now has achieved marked reduction in floor outages. "Standardizing on the Everpure FlashArray platform, the reliability has been phenomenal," notes Turner. "That piece alone has allowed our regional and property IT to really focus on revenue-generating, business-impact IT services."

In addition to revenue impact, there is the confidence factor to support decision making for the team. "Everpure stood out for its intuitive operating system, reliability, and non-disruptive upgrades," says Turner. "You can't just throw legacy systems out because of regulations, gaming control boards. So Pure has been a tremendous help."

They deployed FlashArray to support casino, gaming, and hotel workloads, and use Pure1 for centralized visibility and management across their infrastructure. Evergreen subscription services ensure continuous hardware lifecycle management with predictable costs and clear and transparent terms. "We went to Pure and it's been one of the highest return on investments from a lifecycle standpoint, a security standpoint or reliability standpoint."

Enabling innovation in casino technology

The intuitive interface in Everpure eliminates top-heavy management by enabling junior team members to confidently manage critical infrastructure. Now, the team at PENN Entertainment can focus on what they do best, providing memorable experiences. “We want that real-time data so when you step on property, we know it’s your birthday or anniversary. Pure helps us do that.”