Gullivers Travel Associates finds swift solution to Web search with IBM and DataMirror

Gullivers Travel Associates (GTA, www.gta.co.uk) is one of the world’s leading wholesalers of ground travel products and services. GTA uses industry-leading online technology to supply tour operators and travel agents with a ‘one-stop-shop’ of content comprising over 21,000 directly contracted hotels and apartments and more than 3 million ground travel items.

GTA’s vast inventory is available in 27 languages and includes more than 70,000 rooms every night, airport transfers, sightseeing tours and even concert tickets and restaurant reservations. The company was founded in 1975 and employs over 2,300 staff in 31 offices around the world. GTA has been a wholly-owned subsidiary of Cendant Travel Distribution Services since April 2005.

An important part of GTA’s business is the wholesale of hotel capacity, particularly for European hotels. The company enters into contracts with hotels to buy the right to occupy rooms on particular dates, then re-sells this capacity to travel agencies and tour operators, and also via third-party consumer Web sites such as Orbitz and ebookers. Faced with significant growth in Web-based queries from US clients, GTA needed to optimise its infrastructure to achieve the best price-performance ratio.

Chris Anders, IT Operations Manager at Gullivers Travel Associates, explains: ”We wanted to serve our clients faster and at lower cost, which would also help us to attract and retain new business. To achieve this, it was particularly important to be able to scale the solution at known costs.

“By using DataMirror Transformation Server to duplicate data from our core DB2 databases on the System i5 platform to a separate Web query platform, we have been able to optimise each system for the best performance for its specific task. This helps us to achieve our goals of improved performance, reduced costs and greater scalability. The solution also enabled us to keep the management of business-critical data on the highly reliable System i5 platform.”


Linking islands of information

The heart of GTA’s business – and one of its key competitive differentiators – is the core database for managing information on hotel facilities and room availability. This database is hosted by IBM DB2 Universal Database software on two IBM System i5 570 platforms, each with 16 IBM POWER5 microprocessors. Custom-built software running on several other System i5 solutions supports the maintenance of the database, including calculations of hotel tariffs and updates to information on facilities.

“Room availability can change at a second’s notice, and unless we can guarantee an up-to-the-second view of the data, we run the risk of double-booking rooms. To ensure accuracy, it’s crucially important to work from a single master copy of the data for both the core database and the Web search engine,” comments Anders. “Clearly, reliability and availability are crucial attributes for the core database, which is why we wanted to keep it on the System i5 platform.”


Breaking the bonds of data performance

The challenge for GTA was to preserve its tried-and-trusted database management platform, while boosting the speed and cost-efficiency of servicing Web queries on its data. The solution was to implement DataMirror Transformation Server software, which replicates the DB2 database structures directly into Oracle databases running under Linux® on IBM System x 460 servers. These process the queries and deliver the results as XML data streams to Apache Tomcat Web servers running on nine IBM BladeCenter servers.

Transformation Server, DataMirror’s high-performance real-time and bi-directional data integration solution, uses industry-leading log-based Change Data Capture (CDC) technology to capture changed data from existing database recovery logs, avoiding the overheads and risks associated with trigger-based and table-scan based solutions. Data changes are captured in the source system as they happen and flow immediately to the target database systems or middleware message queues, keeping distributed information up-to-date and in sync.

“We selected DataMirror Transformation Server primarily on the basis of its excellent performance,” says Anders. “Another important factor was the support and service from DataMirror. The DataMirror consultants understood our business and what we were trying to achieve, and because DataMirror is both the publisher and the vendor of the software, we were very confident that they would offer the best long-term support.”


Giant improvements at reduced costs

The key benefit of the IBM and DataMirror solution is the improved performance it offers for Web database queries. Average search times have been cut from around five seconds to less than one second, enabling GTA’s clients to serve information to their customers faster. GTA’s clients also use data streams from other wholesale companies, so speed of delivery is a crucial competitive advantage.

“The IBM and DataMirror solution is helping us to stay ahead of rival firms who also offer online booking services,” says Anders. “Put simply, if we can deliver accurate results faster than the competition, we are likely to secure more bookings.”

The modular System x and BladeCenter architecture allows GTA to expand the solution in a linear manner at known costs. “If an existing client doubles the number of searches, or if we win a new client, we can simply add more servers to handle the workload,” says Anders. “Essentially, we’re using the three optimal IBM server platforms for each specific task – System i5 for managing a large, business-critical database; System x for high-performance database query workload; and BladeCenter for powerful Web serving and modular scalability.”


Virtual organisation produces results

The four x460 servers used by GTA each have four Intel Xeon processors, and have the unique ability to be logically grouped into larger processing units. GTA has created two virtual eight-way servers by pairing off the x460s, effectively creating two large Oracle databases, each running on eight Xeon CPUs. Grouping the System x servers has enabled GTA to reduce the number of data streams delivered by the i570 from four to two, freeing up processing cycles for core operations.

Says Anders, “Grouping the System x servers allows us to share the internal disks of two physical machines across a single database. So instead of six 74GB disks per database, we can have twelve. This gives us a working storage solution until we implement a full SAN later in the year.”

By moving the query and Web serving workload to System x and BladeCenter servers, GTA has achieved its goal of being able to expand the solution in standard increments, at known prices. The use of Transformation Server to replicate data from the core databases on the System i5 helps ensure high-performance and availability, while preserving the advantages of managing the databases on the i570.

“The System i5 platform is unbeatable for managing our large, complex databases,” says Anders. “The i570s are incredibly stable and easy to manage, so the day-to-day management costs are very low. The large capacity means that we can manage very large data sets in a single physical footprint, which helps to keep our infrastructure simple.”