Pigg's Peak Casino, the first legal land-based operation in Southern Africa to successfully implement a gaming facility in cyberspace, bet on Dell Computer to provide high-availability server technology and advanced web-based management capabilities to run the virtual casino from its base in Swaziland.
The site, www.piggspeak.com, is an extension of the actual Pigg's Peak Casino, situated in the scenic Protea Pigg's Peak Hotel about an hour's drive from the Swazi capital, Mbabane.
A profusion of land-based gaming centres in neighbouring South Africa prompted the privately owned casino to look at ways to supplement income. With the blessing of the Swazi Gaming Board, the cyber casino was created as an online extension to the existing land-based operation.
Gamers anywhere in the world can access the website through a standard browser and, after registering, play a choice of games including American roulette, blackjack, baccarat and poker. The site does stipulate that in terms of its Swaziland gaming licence, online gamers should be over 21 years of age to play and that it is a player's responsibility to ensure that they are entitled within their own jurisdiction to gamble on the Internet.
State-of-the-art software, developed by a large international company and audited by an actuary, uses secure credit card transactions to add players' winnings to their accounts.
Aside from gaming, visitors to the website can browse information about the hotel and casino, make reservations and more.
Dell Computer in South Africa, on the strength of its track record in the gaming industry in the subcontinent and world-wide, was tapped to supply and install a high performance Intel Pentium Pro-based Dell PowerEdge 6100 server on site in Swaziland to run the operation.
Dell's high availability features, such as hot-pluggable redundant power supplies and cooling fans, redundant network cards, RAID capability, hot-plug disk drives and ECC memory, reflect the criticality of the SQL Server/Windows NT application.
Other noteworthy features of the implementation include sophisticated web-enabled management facilities provided by Dell on the back of HP OpenView. These allow system managers at Pigg's Peak to manage the server in real time across the Internet.
"Using a standard browser we can log in at any time through a secure TCP/IP port and view the status of the system," says Lew Koor, financial director of Pigg's Peak Casino. "We're able to view key server statistics at a glance and gain access to the complete database of events that have happened on the system.
"These immensely powerful remote management features will be critical to the efficient running of the operation as transaction volumes pick up in the weeks and months ahead."
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