Mantra Group books on storage upgrade

Luxury accommodation company has reduced 100 physical servers down to eight using FlexPod platform

Mantra Group IT group general manager, Garry Rich.

Mantra Group IT group general manager, Garry Rich.

Server room constraints led Queensland-based accommodation firm Mantra Group to start looking at reducing its physical server numbers.

In August 2011, the company began using a FlexPod platform which comprises of a NetApp storage system.

Mantra Group's IT group general manager, Garry Rich, told Computerworld Australia that it used to have 38 terabytes of storage.

“We now have over 100 terabytes [storage] but we are getting more than that because of the various de-duplication technologies,” he said.

Mantra Group has also reduced 100 physical servers down to 24 virtual hosts and eight physical servers.

“For us, the whole FlexPod solution has being an excellent return on investment. Before we had the opportunity to put this in we experienced a lot of issues around disparate storage systems. We also had constraints in our server room,” he said.

Rich added that he can take advantage of the elastic compute power when online traffic surges.

“We have a lot of marketing campaigns which cause large spikes in online bookings and we can now rise to the needs of campaign activities,” he said.

Mantra Group also uses FlexPod to run its back-end production systems and central reservation system.

“The data that we take in through our central reservation system is really important to us. That helps us work out lead times for bookings and length of stay.”

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Because the Group is dependent on consistent bookings, the company monitors social media platforms to see what guests are posting about.

“Social media is important for us because the guest feedback is public and pretty much instant. Sites such as Tripadvisor influence booking decisions so we’ve implemented tools that help us gauge the online sentiment,” Rich said.

“We use a tool called Revinate to aggregate that [social media] information so we can get back to guests in a timely fashion.”

He added that social media aggregation avoids the need for a staff member to be monitoring Twitter and Facebook every day.

Follow Hamish Barwick on Twitter: @HamishBarwick

Follow Computerworld Australia on Twitter: @ComputerworldAU, or take part in the Computerworld conversation on LinkedIn: Computerworld Australia

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