It has been suggested that ‘nobody ever got fired for buying an IBM’, and Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., the world’s second-largest cruise line company, has selected IBM technology and services to support its burgeoning annual data growth of up to 40 percent and save more than $300,000 in storage environment operating costs. Royal Caribbean has replaced products from non-IBM vendors with various IBM solutions including IBM® TotalStorage® Enterprise Storage Servers (codenamed “Shark”), eServer™ pSeries® and eServer iSeries® systems, and Tivoli® enterprise management software that provide increased performance and reliability features and lower total cost of ownership.“We knew we could make our data centre operations more efficient and cost-effective by consolidating our environment onto IBM storage and servers,” said Gregory Martin, Technology Manager, Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. “IBM exceeded all of our needs and requirements by providing increased capacity, lower costs, easy maintenance and improved system uptime.“With a large volume of customer-related and corporate information to capture and store, Royal Caribbean outgrew their three-vendor storage environment that made it difficult to easily expand storage capacity. Seeking to reduce storage maintenance fees, Royal Caribbean recruited IBM to migrate its data to an IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server Model 800. Capable of handling at least 17 terabytes of data, the TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server supports Royal Caribbean’s data warehouse, which run on IBM eServer i890, i830, and i820 as well as IBM eServer p650 and p630 systems.“Customers are responding to the cost savings they are able to realize by consolidating their data on IBM technology,” said Dan Colby, General Manager, Storage Systems at IBM. “This comprehensive storage, server and software solution demonstrates the inherent benefits of building with IBM’s expansive solutions platform for enterprise applications. Companies looking for an attractive return on investment are finding IBM to be the perfect fit.“IBM Global Services also helped Royal Caribbean deploy IBM Tivoli Storage Manager to store back-up and archive copies of data offline to help support the resiliency of the new environment.Based on the success of this storage environment upgrade, Royal Caribbean is looking forward to an increasing role for IBM storage solutions in the continuing evolution of its corporate technology infrastructure.“With our IBM TotalStorage solution, we have connectivity for the first time across all three of our production environments,” said Martin. “The flexibility, manageability, simplicity and increased storage capacity are refreshing.”The Enterprise Storage Server is IBM’s highest-performance disk storage solution designed to work with a variety of hardware and software technologies, such as Windows NT, UNIX, Novell NetWare, the entire IBM eServer family - and with a variety of interfaces, including Fibre Channel, FICON®, UltraSCSI, ESCON.
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