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Founded as a retail travel agency in 1969, MLT Vacations Inc. is one of the largest providers of vacation packages in the United States. The company has two primary product lines. Worry-Free Vacations offers charter vacation packages from seven U.S. cities to destinations throughout the United States, Mexico and the Caribbean. NWA WorldVacations provides vacation packages via regularly scheduled NWA flights to destinations in North America, the Caribbean, Europe and Asia.
Headquartered near Minneapolis with an operations center in North Dakota, MLT Vacations has approximately 500 employees and serves more than one million travelers a year. Both lines of vacation packages are sold through travel agents worldwide. |
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MLT Vacations’ IT architecture was set up around multiple single-node database servers running Oracle 8i on Sun® Solaris servers. For several years, the company purchased its software licenses on a two-year term basis; when those licenses came up for renewal, the company had to make a decision to insure that it was licensed appropriately
At the time, several of the company’s primary systems were reaching capacity. "They were maxed out in terms of the number of CPUs that we could put into the chassis," says Chris Corona, manager of systems services at MLT Vacations, Inc. "We needed to do something from a hardware standpoint".
The company had a variety of options. One option was to purchase larger, more powerful hardware, but that would require a significant investment. Corona says the company established two goals. "We wanted to minimize the cost involved when we needed to repurchase licenses. And we wanted to come up with a solution that would be scalable in the future and keep us from running into a capacity issue over the next several years." They were also looking to reduce costs in hardware and hardware support as well as operating system and operating system support.
Corona, who joined MLT Vacations in 2003, was charged with managing the process, which involved conducting the testing and exploring if a clustered-database approach would be effective. Then, depending on the results, his group would put the new system in place.
The efforts began in early 2004 by comparing how the new options in the Intel®-arena stacked up to the Sun hardware currently in place. Evaluating Linux® was also high on the agenda. "Linux was one of the first assumptions,"Corona says. "We wanted to look at it because it tied into our ability to reduce costs. Linux is a less costly option for purchase and support."
MLT Vacations already had experience with a UNIX® technology-based operating system so the company saw the move to Linux as incremental. "Linux and Solaris are similar enough to each other that you can make the move without too much effort," Corona says. "And watching the Linux environment over time, it is now at the point that the industry seems to accept that it is stable and enterprise-ready." |
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In its research, MLT Vacations estimated the potential performance boost and an expected price/performance level on a new environment. In May of 2004, in conjunction with IBM resellers with whom it had worked in the past, MLT Vacations conducted a proof of concept with a test cluster consisting of multiple dual-processor IBM® eServer® xSeries® x345/x335 servers running Red Hat Linux. "We were looking at Xeon versus the Opteron processors, 32-bit versus 64-bit," Corona says. "At the time we did our evaluation, the Xeons offered a lower price/performance." He opted for the xSeries system, he added, because it fit in terms of price, options and upgradability. Because of the pricing, Corona opted to build wider—using more two-processor systems—rather than deeper using four-processor systems.
Moreover, IBM was a known quantity to Corona. He had worked with the hardware in the past. And MLT Vacations had trusted relationships with IBM resellers. "We looked at the blades, but wanted to go with a platform that was well known to us and with which we had experience," Corona said.
The choice of Red Hat was dictated by several considerations. Not only was it loaded on the IBM platform, MLT Vacations' IT staff had prior experience with it earlier and it proved to be stable. "Once again, it was a known quantity and that is why we went with it," Corona says.
The test cluster was designed to support MLT Vacations' primary revenue-generating database--its reservation system. "Our core business is reservations," said Corona. "We maintain inventory in our reservation system." The database holds approximately 150 gigabytes of information.
The reservation system is a proprietary application, known internally as Suntrac, which was developed in house. With Oracle serving as the back-end database, Suntrac is core to the business. "If it goes down, we are basically still in the water until we can get it back up," said Corona. Even though reducing hardware and software costs and creating a scalable infrastructure were the main motivating factors for the effort, the need for high availability was also a major priority.
The proof of concept was followed by a couple of months of functional and stress testing. "Everything lined up with what our assumptions were," Corona says. The application could work with a clustered database environment; performance based on the hardware specifications proved to be acceptable.
The project was approved by senior management at the company. "There was never a question as to whether this [Linux] was the right technology," Corona said. "Other questions arose and we answered them to the satisfaction to those who asked." After all, the platform had been tested in house for a reasonable period of time and there were many other examples of Linux being used successfully.
At this point, MLT Vacations began preparing to move the legacy system to the new production environment. The first step was upgrading to Oracle 9i, which was a requirement for moving to the clustered infrastructure. "We focused a fair amount of time on testing," Corona says. "And through our functional and stress testing, we had a version of the database that was 9i." Basically, MLT Vacations was testing three environments—the original platform, the original platform with the upgraded database, and the clustered environment. The most complex part of the upgrade was the planning and the coordination among the database administrators and other parties involved in the process.
As MLT Vacations became more involved with a clustered environment, it quickly learned that the file system needed to be managed in a way that would allow several database servers to access the same files. There were several options to do this, including using raw partitions or the native clustered file system in the database. However, a consultant and an IBM reseller recommended technology from PolyServe. PolyServe's Matrix Server is a symmetric cluster file system that enables scalable data sharing, high availability services that increase system uptime and cluster and storage management capabilities for managing servers and storage as one entity.
Corona opted to use PolyServe's quick-start program in which the company installed the product as an evaluation. "From a project management standpoint," Corona says, "I knew that I could get the environment built that much quicker by having that piece done by somebody who knew how to do it. Without having to research it, we could get the testing done."
PolyServe emerged as an important partner in the project. A cluster is a very dynamic environment with several key components. Often, when problems emerged, it wasn't clear to whom MLT Vacations should turn, and PolyServe offered valuable support. The PolyServe product integrates tightly with Oracle and PolyServe professionals could answer questions that perhaps could’ve been directed to Oracle. "They really earned the business and that is why we decided to go with them in the production platform," Corona said.
The final pieces of the new environment included reworking the storage infrastructure and load-balancing on the front end. In the past, MLT Vacations had relied on direct attached storage as well as a Hitachi SAN. "We brought in a pair of Brocade Fibre Channel switches," Corona said. The new set up could be managed better and increased the systems' data integrity. To manage the load balancing on the front-end of the database, he opted for Big IP from F5 Networks.
It took approximately four months for MLT Vacations to upgrade its database and migrate to the new cluster. This included building and testing the hardware infrastructure and then testing how to best execute the migration.
Testing how to migrate the environment proved to be one of the critical aspects of the process. "In our testing, it was going to take anywhere from 10 to 20 hours to actually move the data over, which was longer than the upgrade," says Corona. If once the migration was complete and a problem emerged a few days later, it could've required moving back to the old environment, which would take another 10 to 20 hours. Through testing, the migration time for the reservations database was reduced to 12 hours. |
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The migration, which in addition to the reservation systems included the financial system, a data warehouse and smaller, supporting databases, is now complete. In total, seven databases are running on the production cluster and another 10 to 15 on a development cluster. "Everything has performed very well," Corona says. "It works and works stably."
As for the move from Solaris to Linux, Corona noted, "there are some differences. They aren't huge but they are valuable to know. But it was not a difficult transition. I wouldn't be afraid of it. It has met our needs." |
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| Elliot King is an associate professor at Loyola College in Maryland where he specializes in new communication technology. Elliot has written five books and several hundred articles about the emergence and use of new computing and communication technology. Elliot can be reached at eking212@comcast.net. |
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