Data Center Availability and Performance Management Solutions

Executive Summary

Overview
Carnival Cruise Lines (CCL), the flagship company of Carnival Corporation & plc, a global cruise vacation operator with a portfolio of 10 distinct brands, has earned the position as world’s largest, most popular, and most profitable cruise line.

Barriers
CCL needed to quickly add more robust IT capabilities to meet ambitious objectives in its continued pursuit of quality service to its guests. The initiatives essentially break into two areas: data center availability and e-commerce.

Data Center Availability: The first challenge was for CCL to appropriately scale system and data availability for its Shipboard Property Management System (SPMS). The SPMS provides cruise guests with the ability to use a special onboard credit card to buy a host of products and services during trips as well as to generate final invoices for disembarkation. System downtime and data unavailability could diminish the seamless, enjoyable experience of guests.

E-Commerce: Understanding that the Internet was fast becoming a vital vacation research tool—and wanting to provide enhanced conveniences to both potential and returning guests—CCL knew it needed to quickly ramp up performance levels for its Carnival.com Web site. Primary goals were to improve load capacity of the Web site to 1,800 simultaneous users and to reduce Web page response times to two seconds or less. To add to those challenges, this rapid-cycle undertaking had to be completed in time to launch the new and improved Web site for the heaviest booking season.

Solution
For its system and data availability challenges, CCL used a number of tools. It sought to simplify software management by introducing an enterprise-wide solution that would support both its ship-side and shore- side facilities. CCL standardized its software infrastructure on a data center availability solution from Symantec Corporation that includes Veritas Storage Foundation and Veritas NetBackup software.

While developing and testing its next-generation web site just prior to launch, CCL experienced trouble meeting its desired user load levels and page response times. The leisure travel company once again turned to Symantec for an application performance management solution based on Symantec i3 software. With the help of the Symantec systems engineer, CCL was able to configure a solution to identify and isolate the cause of system performance problems and bottlenecks. CCL is now in the process of
rolling out the application performance management solution based on Symantec i3 across its enterprise applications infrastructure.

Benefits
Improved customer-interaction systems—enhanced with Symantec technologies—have CCL sailing full speed ahead, with business value that includes:

• Greater system availability
• Backup standardization
• Revenue loss avoidance
• Improved operational efficiency