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Company Success Stories - Sabre Holdings
Travel Industry Pioneer Sabre Holdings Selects the AMD Opteron™ Processor for Customer Search Platform after Realizing Dramatic Performance Increases
Profile
Sabre Holdings
"We first decided to look at the AMD Opteron™ processor in part because it was competitively priced, and our hope was that the processor’s performance would be at least as good as that of our existing systems. However, we were blown away by the performance, finding that it significantly exceeded our expectations. - Craig Murphy, chief technology officer"
Company Profile
Sabre Holdings, an S&P 500 company, is a world leader in travel commerce, retailing travel products and providing distribution and technology solutions for the travel industry. Sabre Holdings supports travelers, travel agents, corporations and travel suppliers through its companies: Travelocity, Sabre Travel Network, and Sabre Airline Solutions. Headquartered in Southlake, Texas, in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, the company has more than 6,000 employees in 43 countries. More information is available at www.sabre-holdings.com.
Challenge
Fueled by the increased ability for travel agents and consumers to access online search tools that enable automated airfare searches, the Sabre system, which processes 48 million shopping, pricing and availability transactions daily, has experienced a dramatic increase in the processing demands on its core mainframe application. Today the custom-designed Global Distribution System (“GDS”) currently processes approximately 17,000 messages per second.
The Sabre GDS provides travel suppliers, travel agencies and travelers with one of the most efficient marketplaces in the world. Every leading travel provider around the globe is accessible via the Sabre GDS. Buyers have access to real-time, perfect information about price and product availability, and sellers have real-time control over product marketing and distribution. For travel agencies (online and offline) and consumers, this provides one-stop, seamless comparison-shopping.
The Sabre GDS consists of three subsystems, of which one, the Air Travel Shopping Platform, manages both shopping and pricing for the company’s online customers, accounting for more than 50% of the total data processing load for Sabre. Shopping accounts for a significant amount of processing power, so much so that Sabre’s IT department identifies the need for the company to keep up with the ever-increasing demand on processing power as the “shopping problem.” “Because online shopping is highly tied to memory and the CPU, we had seen the shopping problem push the memory limits on our existing systems beyond a comfortable point,” said Craig Murphy, chief technology officer, Sabre Holdings.
Solution
Sabre, which has historically been quick to leverage new technologies that have helped it remain at the forefront of the travel industry, embarked on an ambitious migration project a few years ago that was designed to replace existing systems with more efficient ones, in order to address the significant increases in processing demands created by Sabre’s growth. As part of this project, Sabre’s IT team decided to review the AMD Opteron™ processor. “We knew we needed the fastest machines available, and ones that offered improved price-performance, in order to address the processing demands of the shopping problem,” said Alan Walker, vice president of Sabre Labs.
Sabre reviewed the benefits of the AMD Opteron processor, based on the x86 instruction set, including AMD64 technology with Direct Connect Architecture, and quickly made the decision to deploy AMD Opteron processor-based systems. HP quickly provided evaluation units of the AMD Opteron processor-based HP ProLiant DL585. Those evaluation units enabled Sabre, together with their data hosting partner EDS, to establish that AMD64 technology would meet the rigorous demands of Sabre’s mission-critical production environment by reliably processing millions of searches successfully.
After comparing the features, performance characteristics and reliability of the
AMD Opteron processor against many of the other proprietary 64-bit platforms, Sabre ultimately selected more than 70 four-way HP DL585 servers running Linux Red Hat 3.0 to replace their existing systems. “We found other 64-bit systems on the market to be expensive, and not as fast as we’d hoped,” added Murphy. “We first decided to look at the AMD Opteron processor in part because it was competitively priced, and our hope was that the processor’s performance would be at least as good as that of our existing systems. However, we were blown away by the performance of the AMD Opteron processor-based DL585, finding that it significantly exceeded our expectations.”
The project team was also impressed with the compatibility with existing and legacy applications offered by the AMD Opteron processor. “Sabre uses open standards, so moving between processor architectures and one version of Linux to another wasn’t a concern,” said Paulo Goncalves, technical manager, Product Development. “But the transition to the AMD Opteron processor-based DL585 was clean and smooth, taking only about a day.”
Impact
As part of its multi-year migration project, Sabre today has installed a production system of AMD Opteron processor-based HP DL585 servers that is the core of a system that will eventually replace the mainframe system. By handling production traffic for the low-fare search platform, the AMD Opteron processor-based production system is effectively reducing the processing burden on the ATSP, helping process shopping and pricing requests more quickly. “The AMD Opteron processor-based farm in production today is handling as much as 50% of the transactions that the existing mainframe system had been able to handle,” said Walker.
Based on the success of the AMD Opteron processor-based systems, Sabre has standardized on the HP DL585 platform for their search engine, and is currently evaluating other areas of the Sabre organization that would benefit from the performance gains that the AMD Opteron processor has already delivered to their search capability. “For the online consumer, travel shopping can never be too fast or too competitively priced,” reports Murphy. “The AMD Opteron processor is helping Sabre deliver customer value that exceeds customer expectations by providing unprecedented performance at competitive prices.”
Quote
“We first decided to look at the AMD Opteron processor™ in part because it was competitively priced, and our hope was that the processor’s performance would be at least as good as that of our existing systems. However, we were blown away by the performance of the AMD Opteron processor-based DL585, finding that it significantly exceeded our expectations.” – Craig Murphy, chief technology officer, Sabre Holdings
About AMD
AMD (NYSE:AMD) designs and produces innovative microprocessors, Flash memory devices and low-power processor solutions for the computer, communications and consumer electronics industries. AMD is dedicated to delivering standards-based, customer-focused solutions for technology users, ranging from enterprises and governments to individual consumers. For more information, visit www.amd.com .
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