The outsourcing of the CPD makes it easier for AC Hotels to provide cloud services to its hotels

AC Hotels has opted for Interxion to carry out the outsourcing of a part of its IT infrastructure, an initiative that has allowed the hotel chain integrated into the Marriott group to consolidate its teams, the introduction of the SaaS model to facilitate IT services to their 90 hotels and the establishment of a business continuity plan, while reducing costs and simplifying administration.

The hosting service provider in independent data centers Interxion has carried out the outsourcing process of the main CPD of AC Hotels. This project has allowed the hotel company to optimize its response times and meet the level of service that the agencies requested., a time of less than seven seconds. In addition, the company has developed a private cloud to ensure the availability and security of IT services to the various hotels of the group.

AC Hotels, with hotels in Spain, Italy and Portugal, managing more than 90 hotel establishments -around 9.000 Rooms- and adding a template that exceeds the 2.500 employees, undertook this project to simplify and bring together a dispersed ICT environment and adapt it so that it would generate competitive advantages for the group, greater added value in their processes and at the same time new channels such as online sales are developed. On the other hand, this outsourcing process is now a facilitating element in the joint venture with Marriott International.

The initial risk assessment of the business continuity plan, the need for more technical space, geographical dispersion and high power density per rack, made AC Hotels opt for the virtualization of different platforms and to outsource the main data center.

Jose Maria Gallo, IT Manager at AC Hotels, explained that “the decision to outsource the CPD was clear, the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) is much less than building a new one, since we are talking about very specialized facilities and services and, In addition, is not part of the "core" of our business. On the other hand, allows us to maintain control of all our systems since our outsourcing model is colocation, so Interxion is to our servers what AC Hotels is to our customers, hotels with quality services . On the other hand, the SaaS model developed eliminated technological responsibilities in hotels, with the dispersion and heterogeneity that this implied, in addition to reducing and rationalizing operating costs."

AC Hotels' selection of Interxion was determined by several factors, starting with the fact that Interxion "is a neutral point, which allows us to work with all our communications providers". On the other hand, purely physical conditions were also taken into account since the "Interxion CPD is located less than 100 kilometers from our CPD and we can perform symmetrical synchrony with NetApp's active/active MetroCluster solution.", says Gallo pointing to the Data Processing Center that the hotel chain has at a headquarters in Somosaguas. Interoute is the provider that facilitates the connection between both DPCs, which are fiber-linked with redundant roads to the north and south with different suppliers (Iberdrola and Unión Fenosa).

Along with redundancy – both in communications and in the power supply- and security, AC Hotels' commitment to energy efficiency was also a point that played in favor of Interxion and, In fact, the hotel chain was the first in Spain to make use of a 'cube' to make the most of the air in the cold aisle; a key point considering that AC Hotels has in Interxion with 48 servers per rack. It is specifically four racks - two for servers, one for communications and one for storage- hosting HP blade servers.

The project was developed along the course of 2009 no incidents based on detailed planning. "Once we were clear about the need for a Business Continuity Plan. (Bcp), a theoretical project of all services was carried out to minimize the risks associated with the change and downtime, designing a solution whose goal was to eliminate RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and ensure RPO (Recovery Point Objective) closest to the time of the fall, depending on the criticality of the services", Tells.