Inside Asian Gaming

October 2017 inside asian gaming 37 “With an increasing reliance on sophisticated integrations that enable video, alarm and transactional data to be combined and analyzed for enterprise-wide situational awareness, the gaming industry is experiencing the perfect storm of data dependency.” redundancy and system resilience from the ground up. There is little point employing sophisticated measures to protect data without the right foundations in place. In casino environments, a hierarchical “mesh” network topology is preferable. This is where key components in the core, distribution and access layer are all interconnected to facilitate multiple pathways for data relay. While this topology mitigates risk against a single point of failure anywhere in the network, it can be seen as too costly to implement. By contrast, a “star” topology tends to be the more commonly chosen network design among casinos based on affordability. In this architecture, devices are directly, but only, connected to the core which presents a greater risk of data loss. If the central switch goes offline, the entire network could fail. One way to mitigate this risk is to design a single core switch with dual supervisors. There are also other solutions that can be employed, depending on the facility security budget. Bandwidth requirements are also a concern. Taking care to calculate bandwidth requirements or “network load” as it is also known is another crucial aspect of network design to ensure high quality, high availability surveillance data. Camera count, bit rate, routes through the network and more, all impact on bandwidth saturation levels which need to be within specific parameters to avoid data loss. The process to determine these requirements In Focus