Information flow. All the leading companies are trying to generate better information flows from their IT investments. Here's another example.
Starwood Finds External Peace with EMC
by Alex Woodie
11/27/2001
Starwood Hotels & Resorts is one of the largest hotel holding and management companies in the world. With more than 700 properties, including the Sheraton, Westin, St. Regis, W, and The Luxury Collection hotel chains, Starwood caters to travelers accustomed to upscale service and decor.
Not surprisingly, keeping a company of this size and distinction growing smoothly requires a well-crafted IT infrastructure that can scale to meet new demand. For its 200-plus North American properties, Starwood has been running SAP on AS/400 servers since 1997. Today it is considered the largest iSeries-based SAP deployment in the world, providing financial and payroll processing for more than 60,000 Starwood employees in the United States and Canada.
Like most large corporations, Starwood's critical applications run on a variety of platforms, not just on OS/400 servers. In addition to the SAP system, Starwood's North American hotels rely on the steady functioning of applications that reside on IBM's AIX, Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX, and Microsoft's Windows operating systems running on a mix of servers. Indeed, in Starwood's main corporate data center in Phoenix, Ariz., there are seven applications spanning 25 servers.
Keeping a disparate IT infrastructure running smoothly requires Starwood to sustain a variety of specially trained IT personnel, as well as maintaining service contracts with each of the platform and application vendors. Consolidating applications onto a single platform may look nice on paper, but it's not a feasible alternative in the real world, nor a desirable one in this volatile IT market where platforms are absorbed into other systems or dropped entirely.
However, Starwood found substantial benefits in consolidating one aspect of its IT infrastructure onto a single, standard platform. That aspect was data storage.
The Benefits of External Data Storage
The decision to consolidate Starwood's collection of internal data stores onto a single external platform was driven by two desires, said Mike Morgan, Starwood's vice president of corporate information systems, finance. First, consolidating all storage onto one platform would reduce 25 potential failure points to a single point of failure. Second, an external storage infrastructure would allow Starwood to rapidly add more storage, and do it more cost effectively.
"In an environment with so many different applications, it's hard to get something that's reliable and robust," Morgan said. "Plus the fact that we continually have to grow [our storage] in small chunks...The larger an environment gets, the more costly it gets to run."
For an installation as big as Starwood's, there are three enterprise storage options that commonly surface. EMC Corporation, Hitachi Data Systems, and IBM sell large arrays that hold hundreds of disks and can scale well into the multi-terabyte range. Starwood quickly ruled out the disk array from Hitachi because it doesn't support the iSeries. The company considered IBM's Enterprise Storage System, commonly called "Shark," but lost interest earlier this year when it found out that a Shark installation would have required the company to maintain its internal iSeries disk, as well as the Shark array. "We looked a little at Shark," Morgan said. "I think that Shark has a niche. It just wasn't a good fit for all the things we wanted to do with it."
Starwood's eventual decision to go with EMC's disk array, called Symmetrix, was also strengthened by EMC's reputation and its platform-agnosticism, said Kevin Malik, Starwood's director of information systems, finance. "EMC's focus is on storage, disaster recovery, and business continuity," Malik said. He also cited a Gartner Group study that pegged EMC's customer service rating as the highest in the IT industry.
Symmetrix in Practice at Starwood
Starwood's deployment of Symmetrix is commencing in two stages. The first stage involved the SAP application and went live in August, while the second stage will include all the other applications and is scheduled to go live in December.
The iSeries portion of the data migration went smoothly and necessitated only a small period of downtime on a weekend, Malik said. Starwood's network of six production iSeries machines--one 12-way iSeries Model 840 with 24 GB of memory functioning as the main SAP database server, a four-way 830 that's the backup database server, and four other iSeries servers, including two SB1s, an SB2, and an 830, that function as application servers, all of which are at OS/400 V5R1--are allotted 1 TB of available space in the Symmetrix array. Starwood is using a Symmetrix 8830, a three-bay disk array that is capable of holding up to 384 disk drives. But in this first phase the company is using 61 disks, each of which has two mirrored backup disks in separate bays, comprising a total of 183 disks for the SAP applications.
To increase application response time, Starwood uses 18 GB, 10K RPM disks from Seagate Technologies, but partitions them as 8 GB disks and uses redundant controllers. Response times with Symmetrix are comparable to what Starwood had with internal disk in the iSeries: about 600 milliseconds, Malik said.
While it may take a year or so for Starwood to put a dollar amount on the benefits of a centralized storage infrastructure, Morgan said, the company does report one immediate benefit from the first stage of deployment. Before installing the central data store, it took Starwood up to 8 hours to perform the required tape backups. With EMC's TimeFinder and CopyPoint software, Starwood has a "triple mirroring" setup that allows operators to create two duplicate sets of production and historical data from a single mirrored disk, allowing full backups in just 15 minutes, Malik said.
Starwood disaster recovery capabilities will grow much more when it deploys EMC's Symmetrix Remote Data Facility software during the second stage of the project. SRDF will allow Starwood to replicate its data to the second Symmetrix disk array, which will be placed in a separate data center located on the other side of Phoenix, and connected via a high-speed T3 line.
An Early Christmas Present?
But perhaps the best is yet to come. During the second phase of the project, scheduled to go live on December 15, Starwood will install a second 8830 Symmetrix array that will hold the data for the rest of the company's applications, as well as the mirrored SAP data. These additional applications include a Windows-based financial consolidation application from Hyperion Solutions, an RS/6000-based data warehouse from SAS Institute, a Windows-based travel and expense reporting solution from Concur Technologies, the Microsoft Outlook email program, and two home-grown OS/400 applications that run under SAP. All told, the two Symmetrix arrays will be serving seven production applications, each of which will have the appropriate-size disk drives befitting the applications' characteristics, including 18 GB, 36 GB, 72 GB, and 180 GB drives. Additionally, Starwood will begin using the Fibre Channel storage protocol with its iSeries servers instead of the SCSI protocol, further improving the installation's fault tolerance.
"We're positioning ourselves for future growth and demands," said Malik, who estimates that his Symmetrix arrays will be holding 7 TB of data when stage two is completed, and growing at a rate of 3 GB per month six months from now. "Moving into multiple terabytes is not cheap when you start adding disks."
As for the execution of EMC's customer service department, Morgan scored them a perfect 10. "They've been good to work with, flexible, attentive to detail. And they executed. That's what's important to me."
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