Fairmont Raffles Hotels International (FRHI), is a leading global hotel company with over 100 hotels under the Fairmont, Raffles, and Swissôtel brands. Recent growth has taken the company from being a predominantly North American operator to a worldwide brand management company with such famous icons as The Savoy in London, a Fairmont-managed hotel, The Fairmont Banff Springs, Le Royal Monceau, Raffles Paris, and the Swissôtel Kolkata.
FRHI has been a Q9 customer since 2004, when the hotel company first contracted with Q9 to provide data centre co-location services - space, power, HVAC, Internet bandwidth, physical security - for the IT infrastructure supporting its corporate-level production systems, including e-mail, HR, finance, sales and central reservations.
Although FRHI previously had its own data centre, the space it occupied was needed as additional office space to support the company's global growth activity. FRHI also found that it would be prohibitively expensive to install a generator system that could provide backup power to their data centre in the event of a power failure. "After looking at a number of potential partners, we felt Q9's overall solution was better from both a price and facilities perspective," says Vineet Gupta, SVP Technology at FRHI, explaining their choice.
In 2009, FRHI renewed its co-location services contract with Q9 after reviewing a number of other potential providers in the Toronto area.
"As we got larger, redundancy became a bigger issue," says Gupta, "So a key value with Q9 and a prime driver for our contract renewal was the ability to establish a secondary site in a geographically diverse Q9 data centre, which few other providers were able to offer."
Since then, the company has grown considerably through the addition of new hotels, many of which are located outside of North America.
Previously, FRHI had co-located its backup infrastructure in one of Q9's Calgary data centres. With its growth, however, and the increasing need to ensure 7x24 worldwide availability and reliability of all its critical corporate systems, Fairmont chose to configure its primary and secondary data centres in an activeactive mode. This meant moving the backup infrastructure from Calgary to one of Q9's Toronto area facilities to take advantage of the higher-bandwidth links between Q9's GTA facilities for real-time mirroring, dynamic load balancing and fast failover between the two sites in the event of an outage.
FRHI has also set up additional data centres in Zurich, Dubai, Singapore and Shanghai. By installing application servers in these locations, the firm is able to ensure consistently high performance globally. The hub for the company's data centre operations worldwide, however, continues to be in Q9 facilities, with a fully redundant, dual-site architecture to ensure business continuity and disaster recovery protection.
While Q9 continues to provide robust, reliable data centre facilities, FRHI chose to provide the ongoing monitoring and management for its equipment located at Q9, leveraging the capabilities of its own IT staff.
"We've had a very positive experience with Q9 over all these years," says Gupta.
Along with space, power, HVAC and security, Q9 provides Internet bandwidth, in FRHI's case 50Mbps burstable to 100Mbps to support fast, reliable access to centralized corporate systems by hotels around the globe.
"The extra bandwidth capacity is also critical for ensuring fast access to our Web sites when we run marketing campaigns, for example, and it seems that other companies are often accessing our sites to check our rates and other information, which also drives up bandwidth requirements," states Paul Chin, Vice-President, Infrastructure, Technology Services at FRHI.
The company is also benefiting from Q9's bandwidth aggregation service. The amount of Internet traffic measured in and out of one Q9 data centre is aggregated with the amount measured in and out of the other Q9 data centre, for a single, total billing, allowing FRHI to take advantage of higher volume bandwidth pricing discounts.
"With the aggregation, we avoid having separate contracts and separate billing for our Internet usage at the two locations, which is reasonable since each location is really just backing up the other and while the Internet connection at one location is active, the other is idle," explains Chin.
Gupta concludes his comments about the co-location relationship with Q9 by saying that, "Q9's contribution to the smooth running of our operations in support of our continued success and growth has been significant, and we are very happy with Q9."
