Amadeus’ Technology Helps Travelers Look Before They Book
It is now prime vacation time for many and travel planning is at its peak. When you make your plans, it’s very possible you’ll be making your reservations via an Itanium-based solution.
Whether you book online, by phone, or in person, there are generally two parts to the system: an online booking engine and a company which provides the connection between that booking system and the travel providers. That second part of the system is called a Global Distribution System.
The largest global processor of these travel transactions is Amadeus Global Travel Distribution S.A., which supports more than 94,000 travel agency locations and 32,000+ airline sales offices in hundreds of countries and territories. To do so, they must manage 500 million travel bookings per year, through connections to 95% of all scheduled airlines, 22 car rental companies serving 36,000 locations, nearly 77,000 hotels, and 17 cruise lines.
On a daily basis, Amadeus handles nearly 300 million transactions of all kinds and up to 2 million internet-based bookings at their Erding, Germany data center, one of the largest civilian data centers in the world. With price competition becoming incredibly fierce, Amadeus’ Fare Quote system is in high demand. This allows customers to compare prices based on different carriers, routes, and dates before booking. How do they make this happen? At the core of their system is a growing server farm with 59 HP Integrity rx8620 servers, each of which are equipped with 16 Intel Itanium processors, running SUSE Linux and Amadeus’ Altéa reservation system. Thanks to extensive Amadeus-exclusive IT infrastructure innovations, SUSE, and the Itanium-based systems, they are able to handle more than 5,500 consumer requests per second during peak hours. The system actually takes less than one third of a second to process data inquiries and completes each fare search within five seconds.
All of this processing is an incredibly complex task. For example, when a customer is searching for the lowest airfare possible, the Amadeus solution can produce more than 200 low-fare options per query. These options have to be accurate, timely, and structured so customers can easily navigate options based on changing dates, switching airlines and airports, and even reconsidering destinations. This means providing many millions of instructions to the server system per query.
These demands make system response time, rapid reallocation and scalability critical elements to the server system.
Fortunately, for Amadeus, and probably you if you’re booking your next trip online, all of these computing needs are met with Itanium-based systems.
Tags: travel