Reducing the time to thrill: amusement resort achieves 40% faster electronic transactions
If your primary business was delivering fun, where would you look to improve guest services? Cedar Fair Entertainment Company, one of the largest regional amusement-resort operators in the world, wanted to provide a faster, more efficient guest ticketing and payment service. Today, they are providing 40% faster, more efficient electronic transactions for guests, reducing the “time to thrill,” with the help of an HP Converged Infrastructure and solutions from HP Networking.
Cedar Fair has more options for growth with HP Converged Infrastructure
Over the last 25 years, Cedar Fair grew considerably and the challenges it faced as a business changed. After acquiring five amusement parks, the company grew from 12 to 17 parks. The parks vary in size, from large amusement parks such as Cedar Point, Knott’s Berry Farm, and Canada’s Wonderland, to smaller regional parks like Dorney Park and Worlds of Fun. Several of the newer parks had more modern infrastructure and newer point-of-sale (POS) and ticketing applications, but many of the older parks were running piecemeal solutions on different generations of hardware.
By standardizing data centers using HP Converged Infrastructure, the IT teams at Cedar Fair spend less time managing disparate backend systems. To manage its HP technologies, Cedar Fair uses HP Virtual Connect Manager, HP Systems Insight Manager, and HP Command View EVA software. The company deployed HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosures, HP ProLiant BL460c Server Blades, HP BladeSystems c3000 enclosures with eight HP ProLiant BL460c G7 Server Blades, an HP Storage Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) 4400 disk array, and HP Storage P4500 SANs. Everything is connected by HP Networking switches. The environment is almost 100% virtualized, using a combination of VMware and Microsoft® Hyper-V to host its critical applications. For these latest deployments, HP Factory Express services assembled everything at the factory and installed it and then Cedar Fair finished the provisioning. This approach had Cedar Fair up and running 50% faster.
“The HP BladeSystem combined with the virtualized environment gives us a nice simple footprint to manage. Within 10 to 15 minutes, we can build a new virtual server and deploy an application.”
—Todd Sasala, IT Director, Cedar Fair Entertainment Company
When your primary business is fun: achieving faster, simpler transactions for guests
Cedar Fair has implemented cashless systems for POS, ticketing, and property management systems that enables guests to pass through lines more quickly and get back to enjoying the park experience. In addition, the reliability and 100% uptime of the system helps Cedar Fair ensure that if a network failure occurs, guests at its parks and hotels can continue to enjoy themselves without experiencing any delays. After all, for Cedar Fair Entertainment Company, its primary business is fun.
>>Read the complete story: CedarFair improves customer experience with HP Converged Infrastructure - US English (CaseStudy)
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>>Read a related blog about converged infrastructure: HP Converged Infrastructure is not just a buzzword
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