Accor North America

Hotelier Improves Data Backup with Sun Server and Storage Technology

Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, Accor North America employs more than 16,000 people and operates more than 950 upscale and economy hotel properties including Sofitel, Novotel, Studio 6, and Motel 6 in the U.S. and Canada. Accor North America is part of Accor, a worldwide leader in hotels, tourism, and corporate services.

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Customer Challenges

Shorten backup window
Strengthen regulatory compliance
Increase storage capacity

Solution

Sun and Sun partner Soccour Solutions worked with Accor North America to refresh its storage area network and backup solution with Sun SPARC Enterprise servers, Sun StorageTek modular arrays and high performance T10000 tape drives. Built-in tape-drive encryption and the StorageTek Crypto Key Management System help protect data.

Business Results

Increased backup speed by 300%
Reduced backup window by 5 hours
ROI expected in 24 months
Increased storage capacity and scalability to more than 40 TB
Met compliance requirements
Improved overall network performance

Products and Services

Story Details

For Accor North America, maintaining hotel guests’ personal and financial data is an important, if less obvious, part of the hospitality it provides. The financial systems in its Dallas data center include multiple applications and storage for processes such as accounting, payables, and invoicing. To ensure adequate performance and capacity, the company upgrades its infrastructure including servers and storage devices about every three years for production and test, and every five years for development.

In 2006, pressure to upgrade was particularly acute. Business growth and consolidation were straining resources at the Dallas datacenter, and its storage solution had nearly reached full capacity. For example, a complete backup of the financial system could take up to 14 hours. Normally performed during slow periods, the lengthy backup was spilling over into business hours when employees needed full access to applications. The company also needed to comply with new payment card industry (PCI) regulations that require encryption for cardholder data sent over public networks.

" We've had a good experience with the duty-cycle, the history and build quality of Sun storage products. The Sun StorageTek 6140 and 6540 arrays and high performance T10000 tape drives are no exception. In particular, we like the built-in encryption in the tape drives, and the fact that we can use it without reducing performance. "

— Ken Sibley, UNIX and Storage Manager , Accor North America

Accor has depended on the performance and reliability of Sun products and services of Sun Advantage partner Soccour Solutions for more than 10 years. Satisfied with its existing Sun solutions, Accor looked to upgrade with newer Sun systems. Soccour Solutions was engaged by Accor to provide solutions recommendations and to assist in the refresh of the company’s backup and storage area network (SAN) infrastructure. By leveraging the Sun Upgrade Advantage program, Accor was able to eliminate six legacy Sun servers to offset the cost of four new Sun servers.

The new architecture includes a Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 server, with SPARC64 VII quad-core processors and running Oracle Financials, that provides Accor with the scalability for future growth and faster report generation. Three Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 servers powered by UltraSPARC T2 processors are set up as media servers running Symantec's Veritas NetBackup 6.5 software to manage the company's data backup flow. The SPARC T5120 servers with Chip Multithreaded processor technology make it a powerful solution to run NetBackup software and move data at extremely fast rates.

The servers are connected via Cisco 9509 switches to Sun StorageTek 6540 and 6140 arrays with SANtricity storage management software, existing Sun FlexLine storage systems, and three StorageTek L180 tape libraries which were upgraded with T10000 tape drives with 500 GB capacity and 120 MB/sec throughput. Combined, the new StorageTek 6540 and 6140 storage arrays can handle more than 40 TB of data, ensuring ample scalability. The solution is covered by a SunSpectrum support agreement.

To strengthen security and PCI compliance, Accor has started encrypting customer data by using the T10000 tape drives’ built-in data encryption and the StorageTek Crypto Key Management System appliance. Accor also upgraded from the Solaris 8 to the Solaris 10 Operating System to take advantage of the enhanced TCP/IP stack and virtualization capabilities of Solaris Containers to partition its OS environment – resulting in improved security, resource utilization and system performance. It also plans to replace a Linux platform running on a Sun Fire X4500 server with the Solaris 10 Operating System

The solution has already significantly improved backup windows. In a recent test, Accor backed up 1.7 TB of data with the SPARC Enterprise T5120 server and two StorageTek T10000 tape drives in just 2 hours and 45 minutes. Before, the same procedure could take up to six hours to complete. “For us, that was a huge improvement,” says Ken Sibley, UNIX and storage manager at Accor North America. “It was almost 300 percent faster on average, and we hit peak performance in the range of 220 MB/sec.” Then, following a recent Oracle upgrade, the performance gains helped Accor cut its backup window by five hours.

Accor is currently automating this backup process, which should further improve backup windows and performance. The company looks forward to gaining a full return on investment within 24 months, and to having an infrastructure that supports business growth for years to come.