Gambling may be the name of the game in Las Vegas, but when it came time to upgrade the corporate network at Circus Circus Enterprises Inc., Jim Crelia wasn't taking any chances. "There's no way to tell exactly how much money we would lose if this network crashed," says Crelia, head of operations at the casino and hotel chain. Crelia had his work cut out for him. When Circus Circus brought him on board in March 1995, it was running its business over an unmanaged mix of LANs and SNA. All of the company's applications— from revenue-generating gambling and room reservations through e-mail and accounting— were loaded onto this infrastructure. It was far from stable: Outages were a daily occurrence. Cabling was a kludge—a big problem given the fact that the slot machines are on the network. And troubleshooting was an all-day job.
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