Leading hospitality chain moves to virtualisation technology for core IT infrastructure

Leading hospitality chain moves to virtualisation technology for core IT infrastructure

Luxury hotel and hospitality chain De Vere Group this week announced that it has chosen to outsource the hosting of its core IT infrastructure.

The move to will enable De Vere Group to one of the data centres owned by hosting provider TelecityGroup in Manchester is designed to ensure the resilience of its centralised IT infrastructure and safeguard the availability of business-critical systems at each of the company’s sixty-five locations across the UK at all times.

Each location runs on a thin client model where the group’s key back-end systems – including its file storage, meetings and events databases, financial systems and human resource (HR) systems – which store and processes over 18 Terabytes of data centrally.

Moving to lower-cost virtualised blades

The hosted TelecityGroup environment is also enabling De Vere Group to implement a virtualisation project that is designed to reduce the company’s overall IT footprint. Through server consolidation and the installation of Blade servers, De Vere Group said it is expecting to achieve a £100,000 reduction in its IT running costs.

Jo Stanford, De Vere Group IT director, commented: “Our central IT systems are the heartbeat of our business. Any downtime would have a severe impact on our business; both in terms of the service we provide our customers and our overall revenue.

“Therefore we need to have total confidence in our central infrastructure. This meant working with a well-known, premium data centre provider – and TelecityGroup was the natural choice for us. By hosting our core IT infrastructure in TelecityGroup’s highly connected Manchester facility, we have access to the key telecom networks through which we can serve our 65 locations, all from within a secure and resilient environment.”

The De Vere Group also recently implemented a new online payments system from UK payment processor SecureTrading to enable fast and secure onlin epayment services across its booking engines and websites (Retail Technology March/April 2012 issue).