Case Study: Six Flags achieves real-time guest insights and consolidated park IT with NetApp

Making Good Times Great Optimizing Customer Experiences with Real-Time Access to Data

Six Flags Entertainment, the world’s largest regional theme-park operator with 18 parks and over 39,000 seasonal employees, needed better, real-time insight into visitor behavior to improve guest experience, optimize staffing and inventory, and measure park performance. Decentralized data and applications at each park prevented enterprise-wide visibility, so the company set a goal to standardize IT, consolidate 18 park data centers into a primary center, and enable real-time analytics from POS and RFID data.

Six Flags standardized on Microsoft and VMware and deployed NetApp storage systems (with SnapMirror replication, Flash Cache, deduplication, FlexVol, and OnCommand) plus identical “mini” park data centers to centralize and virtualize operations. The solution consolidated 9TB of park data, cut report times from 3.5 to 1.5 hours, delivered >16,000 peak IOPS with sub-millisecond latency, reclaimed tens of terabytes of capacity, and enabled targeted staffing and promotions—driving higher guest satisfaction, longer visits, and record revenue and profit results.

Six Flags

Michael Israel

Senior Vice President and CIO