Accor Hotels

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The Travel Accor Reservation System (TARS) runs continuously, 24x7x365, dealing with all time zones, and booking on average 20,000 hotel reservations daily. It is critically important to have the highest levels of availability and security for its IT solution since it is the company's backbone. "It was the simple scalability that made the upgrade to Sun Fire 15K servers a logical choice," says Eric Sanavio, Data Center Director at Accor Hotels.

One particularly attractive feature is Sun's Dynamic System Domains (DSD) technology. The Sun Fire 15K server can host up to 18 domains, which are fully reconfigurable while applications are running. These secure DSDs isolate applications from potential faults providing near-continuous application availability. "Sun's domains allow us to run the application that makes reservations for our customers, while simultaneously running our back office applications, such as statistics or travel agency commission settlements," explains Sanavio. Accor also chose Sun StorEdgeT3 arrays. "The performance improvements from going to the new Sun solution are outstanding. The more disks you add to the system the faster it becomes. For every T3 array you add, you are adding backbone, controllers, connections, and disks. This concept in storage is cutting edge and in theory allows for infinite expansion."

Accor Hotels turned to Sun's Professional Services organization to ensure the highest levels of availability for the Sun solution. "With their day-to-day presence, Sun Professional Services has great knowledge of our technical environment that is quite complex," says Sanavio. Sun services helped the company identify the required service levels and prioritize the gaps and risks to improve performance. Sun services also helped create a robust operational environment for mission-critical applications by addressing the issues of configuration, design and testing, change management, and process and documentation.

Accor Hotels is very pleased with the improved performance of its Sun servers and storage. "The combination of Sun's servers and storage have enabled us to rent out 40% more hotel reservations than last year," concludes Sanavio. "And our e-business has increased 100% over last year."