Royal Caribbean sets sail with new data centre

gallery

Holiday operator Royal Caribbean Cruise Line has invested in a new UK data centre in time for its major sales period.

The new data centre will ensure maximum productivity of Royal Caribbean's critical applications and came about as part of its need to move to bigger headquarters after the lease on its old UK office sites came to an end last year.

James Mead, Royal Caribbean IT project manager told IT PRO that the company was looking to consolidate two previously separate UK-based data centre operations into one at their new offices, reusing as much of their IT equipment that was still fit for purpose to enable the rapid growth of its 600-strong European workforce, while also improving disaster recovery and business continuity without a massive outlay.

"All six of our EMEA [European, Middle East and Africa] sales offices are reliant on the UK-based data centre, which means continuity and failover is crucial to maintaining non-stop business operations. We were at maximum capacity in the old centres because of space limitations" Mead said.

Having initially gone live with its new data centre in time for its busiest sales period between January and March, Royal Caribbean has had time to bed in the new systems, which Mead said are working well: "We've experienced a number of power cuts since the installation, however, the new data centre has insured us against zero downtime of operations."

The data centre uses the latest modular power and cooling infrastructure products from supplier APC, installed by power services specialists, Comtec Power, which Mead said has also provided additional efficiencies for power consumption and management capabilities.

"We reused some switches and servers, but the new centre is now fully expandable, with full back-up power systems," he said. "This means we're fully redundant, so that if the local area goes down we know the business can keep going."

He added: "Cooling is the biggest power requirement and keeps the centre running. But the same equipment now uses less electricity with intelligent power management that means we only charge the back-up batteries we need, for instance. And we now have the ability to manage reporting and alerts from any web-based point."

Royal Caribbean Cruise Line operates Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises and Azamara Cruises.

Email to a friend

Print this page