Norwegian Cruise Line

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The range of activities and entertainment that Norwegian Cruise Line offers its passengers—including visiting the spa, bowling alley, gym, or casino—would not be possible without the datacenters on every ship. Each datacenter operates 24/7 to support dozens of applications such as the point-of-sale systems in the ship's restaurants and shops. The applications are primarily x86-based programs that run on as many as 35 servers, each with direct-attached storage devices that manage multiple terabytes of data. But limited floor space in the datacenters and increasing power and cooling costs made it difficult for NCL to meet the ever-growing demand for new systems and applications. “If a business need arose, we had to tell business owners that their projects might require a higher budget or longer deployment schedule,” says Vincent Cirel, NCL’s chief information officer. “Without the Sun virtualization solution, each new project brought the possibility of infrastructure re-engineering due to space and power limitations.”

To help modernize and upgrade its datacenters, NCL worked with EDS, a technology partner of both NCL and Sun. On Norwegian Sky, which had reached its limit for space and power, NCL consolidated more than 20 physical servers using just three Sun Fire X4150 servers. It chose VMware ESX to partition the physical servers into multiple virtual machines, where the x86-based applications now run. As a 1U, two-socket x64 system, the Sun Fire X4150 server, in combination with VMware ESX, was the perfect choice for NCL, making it possible to eliminate three of the four server racks that previously occupied priceless real estate. With far less hardware in the datacenter, the temperature dropped from 32 to 23 degrees Centigrade (96 to 78 degrees Fahrenheit), significantly reducing NCL's power and cooling costs.

Using Intel Xeon processor 5400 series with quad-core technology, the Sun Fire X4150 servers deliver outstanding performance, running memory- and disk-intensive applications more efficiently. “Application management, deployment, and performance have increased dramatically compared with the old physical systems. That is partially because of the technology refresh, but also because of the virtualized Sun Fire X4150 servers,” says Jeff McVay, NCL’s vice president of IT Infrastructure and Operations. “We are currently running 37 virtual machines on three Sun Fire X4150 servers. We still have 50% capacity open, and we can easily expand without having to purchase more racks.” An additional Sun Fire X4150 server running Windows is connected to a StorageTek SL24 tape autoloader and is used solely for backup. For storage, NCL chose two Sun StorageTek 5320 NAS appliances, because it could use them as Internet SCSI devices on a gigabit network backbone and avoid the cost of a Fibre Channel investment.

With a nearly 90% reduction in servers, the new Sun solution is much easier for NCL to manage and maintain. Server roles are clearly defined on dedicated machines now, simplifying the overall environment. Backups that previously took 14 hours to complete now take just 1 hour. Weekly hardware maintenance has been cut from 90 minutes to just 10 — with no interruption of service. “Without a doubt, the streamlined management is better than we've ever had before and allows the IT staff to focus on delivery of services rather than system management,” says Cirel. Norwegian Sky sets the stage and includes the model datacenter for NCL's newest ship, Norwegian Epic, which is expected to launch in 2010. Norwegian Epic will carry 4,200 passengers, almost double that of ships currently in the fleet, and will have two computer rooms in separate fire zones at opposite ends of the ship. Cirel says, “For Norwegian Epic, we wanted an environment that had its own redundancy and at the same time had a mirrored image somewhere else, providing full redundancy. It's critical that our systems be up and running 24/7.”

Through Sun's Try and Buy program, NCL was able to test the Sun Fire X4150 server; it was pleased to find that the server far exceeded expectations. “With VMware ESX, we were able to virtualize every single onboard application using Sun products. Other competitors tried, but none of them were able to virtualize 100% of our applications. Some of the vendors didn't even know their applications could run virtualized,” says McVay. “With the new Sun systems, we are a lot more agile and flexible in meeting business needs, whereas we were very static with the old monolithic approach.”