How the Western Canada Lottery Corporation Improved Business Continuity with Advanced Data Protection

Every day, millions of people share the same dream of winning the lottery. Western Canada Lottery Corporation (WCLC) makes that dream possible.

Our non-profit conducts and manages lottery games in the Canadian provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, along with Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut. We offer online and retail products, including sports, scratch tickets, and draw-based, big-jackpot games like Lotto 6/49 and Lotto Max. Provincial and territorial governments invest our profits into public services and social programs, including sport, culture, and recreation groups in Saskatchewan.

There’s no shortage of lottery games to play, and our retail kiosks and web and mobile channels all require a tremendous amount of technology. This technology used to involve a maze of servers, storage modules, routers, and switches that connected our infrastructure. It was quite sophisticated, yet maintenance required an engineer to physically walk through the data centre, checking for the blinking red lights that would indicate if something was wrong. Maintaining these complex storage arrays was a heavy burden on our team.

Eventually, this infrastructure reached end-of-life. We had no support for our aging equipment, and we were dealing with constant disruptions and ongoing issues. Our data centre desperately needed a complete refresh.

We were looking for longevity: we didn’t want to undergo a complex procurement process and replace everything only to issue another RFP a short while later if we needed to expand our data centre for a new project. Since we needed to start from scratch, we adopted a new model and chose HPE GreenLake cloud to replace our storage and compute.

Reshaping the heart of our data centre

Our reasons for choosing HPE GreenLake were cost savings and scalability — we only purchased what we used, preventing overpaying and overprovisioning. Soon, the foundation of our refreshed data centre emerged:

• HPE ProLiant DL360 and DL380 Gen10 servers
• HPE Synergy SY480 and SY660 compute modules
• HPE Alletra storage arrays

Our HPE ProLiant servers play a critical role in our compute infrastructure and have significantly streamlined the deployment of low-level services. The HPE GreenLake Support Team provides remote management to our HPE ProLiant servers, eliminating the need for walkarounds and manual server checks at our data centre. Our HPE Synergy compute modules run our critical gaming and lottery platforms. Finally, our HPE Alletra storage array provides reliable storage that is fast enough for our most demanding workloads, thus eliminating the biggest bottleneck in our virtualization stack: our SSD storage is much faster than the tiered mechanical drives it replaced.

HPE GreenLake offers predefined base unit configurations, allowing capacity management without unnecessary administrative overhead. Instead of overprovisioning at the start of our contract, we add capacity as needed, simplifying equipment management and budgeting. As a result, our data centre has cloud-like scalability.

This scalability helps us improve our delivery speed when launching new projects. We can spin up new environments and provision new workloads, and we can also add physical hardware through a change request in our HPE GreenLake contract. Now, WCLC is also considering migrating from VMware to HPE Essentials as our hypervisor, which would bring our virtualization stack under one umbrella.

Air-gapped, immutable cyber protection

In HPE, we found the flexible tools we needed to meet our evolving storage and compute demands. So when it came time to upgrade our data protection and business continuity practices, we were pleased that HPE had another solution to offer: HPE Zerto.

We are deploying HPE Cyber Resilience Vault. It’s built on two HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 units, the industry’s first disaggregated block and file storage arrays. We chose these units for their high performance and fast recovery capability, both of which are crucial for protecting WCLC’s data and ensuring a speedy recovery in case of an incident.

HPE Cyber Resilience Vault operates at the hypervisor layer, allowing us to protect our entire VMware environment without taking snapshots, which some of our vendors prohibit. HPE Cyber Resilience Vault replicates our data while also detecting encryption and infected files. It creates a separate online landing zone as our primary data replication and recovery target, and a fully air-gapped offline vault zone that is isolated and protected from external threats.

With Cyber Resilience Vault, we can recover our data in increments of minutes or hours versus days or weeks with other solutions. Because the vault zone is air-gapped, we can spin up an isolated, clean environment to ensure we don’t replicate malware and that our files can’t be encrypted by ransomware. Because it is immutable, we have backup data that our attackers can’t delete.

Strong support at every stage

While our initial motivators were cost savings and scalability, we quickly realized that the HPE support was unparalleled. The HPE GreenLake team handles firmware upgrades and proactively monitors our environment, allowing our IT team to focus on our critical business workloads. We also talk to HPE Advisory and Professional Services weekly to address recent issues and alerts, deal with storage warnings, and proactively plan hardware refreshes for equipment reaching end-of-life.

HPE GreenLake’s support team offers expertise and assistance with updates, upgrades, and technical issues. Their people take our concerns seriously and constantly look for ways to improve our processes, giving us the tools to innovate and grow without disruption.

Delivering dreams without disruption

WCLC no longer needs IT heroes to put out fires, prop up failing infrastructure, or run around our data centre checking for flashing red lights. Between HPE GreenLake and HPE Cyber Resilience Vault, WCLC has gained a more cost-effective and efficient way to scale while safeguarding our data. 

Our HPE environment is always available to meet our business needs, and that reliability allows us to continue encouraging people to dream big.