Oracle's Infrastructure Software Offers Starwood Highly Available, Scalable and Easily Managed Foundation for Critical Business Applications
DUBAI, UAE; June 8, 2006 - Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc., one of the world's largest hotel and leisure companies, has upgraded to Oracle 10g infrastructure software to support its critical business applications including reservation and guest loyalty, among others. Upgrading to a clustered Oracle Database 10g environment from a single-instance of Oracle9i Database is a part of the on-going migration of Starwood's mainframe applications to an open platform. The company is expecting to complete its three-year mainframe migration project by end of 2006.
With approximately 850 properties in more than 95 countries and 145,000 employees at its owned and managed properties, Starwood needed a highly available and scalable information technology (IT) system to replace its mainframe-based system. To capture, confirm and track the thousands of daily online and phone reservations as well as support more than 20 million members of its Starwood Preferred Guest loyalty program, Starwood relies on Oracle Database 10g Release 2, Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control (Oracle Grid Control) running on a three-node cluster of HP-UX RX8620 servers each with eight dual-core Intel Itanium processors. The combination of Oracle Database 10g and HP Intel Itanium servers deliver a fault-tolerant and high performance infrastructure for Starwood's mission-critical business applications.
Starwood rewrote its applications in Java to position itself for a virtually seamless introduction of incremental business functionality over time. "It was very hard to introduce change in a mainframe environment," said Bill Camp, vice president of Enterprise System Information, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. "So we've adopted a service-oriented architecture that is flexible enough to adapt to changing business requirements going forward. Having made that decision, it was natural to go with Oracle Real Application Clusters for system reliability. We experience less downtime now that the database is online on one node or the other when we perform system maintenance."
The company also adopted Oracle Grid Control to manage and monitor the performance of its clustered database and applications replacing a third-party database management tool. Starwood uses the Oracle Diagnostics Pack for Database and Oracle Tuning Pack for Database in conjunction with Oracle Grid Control to extend its system management and monitoring capabilities. The Oracle Tuning Pack enables automated database application tuning processes, helping to considerably lower database management costs while enhancing performance and reliability. The Oracle Diagnostics Pack manages the performance of Oracle Database environments.
"We made a conscious decision to move away from our previous management tool and establish Oracle Grid Control as the standard going forward," said Arup Nanda, director of Database Engineering and Operations, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. "Oracle Grid Control has helped us to address system management issues proactively, automate previously manual administrative tasks, and reduce the need for extensive DBA training."
Data Warehouse Captures Business Details, Enables Informed Decision Making
Starwood also operates a 15-terabyte Oracle data warehouse for capturing and analyzing its reservations, guest satisfaction survey responses, and group sales data. Their central data warehouse plays a key role in Starwood's ability to track key metrics, forecasting and communicate effectively with its guests. Starwood has also deployed an enterprise marketing management solution with their data warehouse to manage and track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
Starwood uses Oracle Partitioning to help enhance the manageability, performance, and availability of the wide variety of applications using their large data warehouse. Specifically, Oracle Partitioning is used for:
Archiving and backup of data by partition instead of entire tablespaces;
Moving data from expensive, high-end storage to low-cost, commodity disks; and,
Helping to increase the performance and reliability of the data warehouse.
The data warehouse was upgraded to Oracle Database 10g Release 2 on a HP rp8420 server with PA-RISC processors in December 2005.
-Ends-
About Oracle
Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world's largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle, visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com.
Trademarks
Oracle, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Siebel are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
For more inforamtion please conact:
Aly Rifaah
Oracle Middle East
Tel: +9714 390 9000
Email: ali.eltahtawi@oracle.com
© Press Release 2006
