Data centre is plain sailing

A new data centre has boosted the cruise firm's green credentials

Cruise firm Royal Caribbean has installed a data centre that uses virtualisation technology to improve its green credentials.

The company previously operated in two separate locations, but decided to consolidate its European operations into one data centre in Addlestone, Surrey. IT and telephony services were migrated in time to support a seasonal sales peak between January and March.

The data centre, designed and installed by Comtec Power, supports the company’s 600-strong European workforce, so continuity and failover were key considerations.

The site uses technology from vendor APC, and the design uses a virtualised server environment to maximise efficiency and flexibility and keep down power and cooling costs.

‘We wanted a green building and avoided the historical design of flooding as much cooling and power into the data centre by having a scalable solution and a virtualised server environment,’ said James Mead, European IT project manager at Royal Caribbean.

‘We also had to provide disaster recovery for our seven offices that rely on our data centre being live. Built-in spare capacity means we can also expand the data centre to integrate new offices.’

Mead says timely installation and support proved critical to ensure inbound call centre operations were running in time for its busiest sales period.

‘We moved office in December and the data centre had to be running for our peak sales period. During normal times our call centre is open from 8am to 6pm, six days a week, but between January and March, it is open 12 hours a day, seven days a week, as we do 70 per cent of our bookings for the year in that period.’

Despite a number of power cuts, the data centre ensured zero downtime of operations, says Mead.

‘As a business we have grown over the past six years and we wanted a data centre that could sustain continued growth over the next three to five years. We have aggressive growth plans. We have 260 staff and the building is designed to hold 360 staff supported by the data centre,’ he said.