HP Helps Emirates Palace Hotel Maintain 5-Star Customer Experience with Dynamic IT Services

Virtualizing IT environment with HP servers and storage ensures business continuity, reduces energy consumption, saves space

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates 19 May 2015 – HP has recently announced that it has helped the 5-star luxury Emirates Palace hotel speed up check-in, facilitate reservations and eliminate downtime for guest services by consolidating and virtualizing its IT environment. As a result, the hotel can ensure that its guests enjoy the best experience possible.

Located on Abu Dhabi’s famous Corniche, with a 1.3km private beach, large conference center, 85 hectares of landscaped gardens, 302 rooms and 92 suites, the Emirates Palace offers the latest technology to help provide an unrivalled personal experience for each of its guests. High speed internet – one of the fastest and most extensive service in Abu Dhabi - is available across the entire grounds, and 24/7 “IT Butlers” are on call to provide IT support.

“To maintain our 5-star guest service levels and ensure that our guests enjoy their experience here, we needed to make our IT more dynamic,” says Mehmet Akdeniz, Director of IT/AV, Emirates Palace. “The benefits of virtualizing our infrastructure are clear. With their proven experience of large virtualization projects, HP and MDS have enabled us to increase the reliability, flexibility and availability of our IT platform while containing costs and saving space. In addition, this has made our IT more sustainable and “green” by cutting energy consumption.”

Working with local partner MDS, HP deployed a reliable, cost-effective virtual platform based on HP ProLiant blade servers and HP 3PAR storage powered by Intel® Xeon® processors to run the hotel’s business-critical applications, including finance, HR, reservations and IT support. As well as providing a faster response for guests, the new platform improves the productivity of the hotel’s administrative staff by allocating more space for server databases and storing more guest details.

Through extensive VMware virtualisation and server consolidation, HP has boosted the Emirates Palace hotel’s IT efficiency, performance and business continuity while improving space utilization in the data center. A compact HP BladeSystem c7000 enclosure with HP ProLiant blade servers running Intel® Xeon® processors with built-in intelligence and energy-efficient cooling has increased productivity by efficiently balancing workloads, and reduced power costs. It also enables more effective use of the hotel’s storage resources.

Data recovery times have been significantly reduced by an HP 3PAR solution running Intel® Xeon® processors with remote disk-to-disk backup replication, which allows the hotel’s IT team to back up all its data to disk and restore with performance of up to 40TB per hour. By eliminating duplicate data and providing up to 20 times more disk-space savings for efficient data protection, scalable HP StoreOnce B6200 Backup systems protect growing volumes of data and simplify data management across the whole environment.

To ensure that the migration from physical to virtual servers was achieved without interruption to the hotel’s daily business, HP Technology Services carefully tested all application servers before they went into production. Applications such as Exchange Mailbox, Opera, PABX and Micros run on dedicated HP servers.

“HP helps businesses like the Emirates Palace transform their legacy infrastructure to achieve tomorrow’s goals,” says Herbert Zierl, HP UAE Managing Director. “HP simplifies the data center, making it more energy- and space-efficient while being less expensive to operate.”