Eliminating downtime with High Availability Solutions
It’s three in the morning and the telephone is ringing. The system is down, what an unpleasant news in the middle of a good night sleep. Right away, the hotel operation is in chaos, the front office officers are trying to appease guests who are having problem checking in and out of the hotel, bills cannot be printed, waiters could not input the guest orders, and the housekeeping staff is having a nightmare serving guest without knowing their needs or the room status. This is a true nightmare for hotel management.
Unfortunately this scenario happened to Mr. Kenneth Soelarso, the Financial Controller of Adhi Putra Mulia (owning company Mercure Jakarta Kota). System down or hardware failure is a nightmare for hoteliers. When the hotel system is down, all hotel operations is interrupted, hotel personnel are force to serve the customer blindly and manually. For a hotel like Mercure Jakarta Kota, it presents a big problem. With its strategic location in the heart of Jakarta, this hotel never sleeps. The hotel occupancy never falls below 80% and it is the preferred meeting points for businessmen and leisure spot for families over the weekend. Downtime is something the hotel could not afford; it will lead into lost of sales, lost of opportunities, and more importantly the lost of respect from the customers.
Mr. Ketut Iriana, the General Manager of Mercure Jakarta Kota, explained: there are 4 (four) critical points in running a hotel, which is water, electricity, telephone and computer system. These are the main components that must always run and can never be interrupted. With the first 3 components hotels already have a great backup system, but what about the computer system?
(Photo) Mr. Ketut Iriana, General Manager Mercure Jakarta Kota
Hardware failure can happen anytime and can never be avoided. Mercure Jakarta Kota has experienced it twice, in past four years. The first time, the server broke down. And the second time, it was the power supply failure. Fortunately for them, both problems were solved within one day and the damage was minimal. But this might not be the case if it happens again.
After the second incident, Mr. Kenneth and the hotel team looked for a solution that will prepare the hotel when the worse happens, and any hardware failure will not interrupt the hotel computer systems. With the help of REALTA, Mercure Jakarta Kota implemented a High Availability System. With this system, when there is a failure in the main server, a second server will be up and running within seconds, so all hotel operation will be able to resume smoothly without interruption.
WHAT IS HIGH AVAILABILITY SOLUTION?
High Availability, also referred to as “HA” is a term used to describe when a computer system is continuously available. High availability solution will ensure that any downtime events, typically arise from hardware or software failure or environmental anomaly will not affect the availability of all systems and applications. High availability solution is also design to run automatically without any human intervention. In short, when something fails, High Availability Solution will keep all systems and applications continue to run automatically.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
The concept of high availability is quite simple, just like a backup generator, when the main source of electricity is down, then instantly the backup generator will take over, and everything continues to run.
High Availability Solution (HA) will continue to provide users the availability of all systems and applications at all times, despite of any failure or problems. HA is achieved by combining hardware redundancy, backup and restore processing, and a multiple connection centralized data storage. This sounds very complex; actually it is quite complex, it needs careful planning, well design and truly tested before it become a true High Availability system.
When hotels only have data back-up system, and suddenly there is a hardware or software failure, then system operation will stop, until the problem is resolved. After the problem is fixed, then data needs to be restored, and only up to the point when the last backup was created not when the problem occurred. Depending on the frequency of the backup process, there will be data/transactions that are lost because of the failure. The length of this process can be very unpredictable, and the longer the down time, the bigger the lost the hotel will incur.
THE RESULT
After the High Availability (HA) implementation by REALTA was completed, the solution was put to the test and witnessed by Mr. Ketut Iriana (GM), Mr. Kenneth Soelarso and the management of Mercure Jakarta Kota. When the main server is down, the High Availability system sense the failure, and right away directs all systems and applications that are currently running to the second server. With the High Availability system, there is no data/transaction loss, and all system and applications will continue to be available to all users in the hotel. This whole process only takes 17 seconds, from the time the failure happens until the second server is online and continues to run all system and applications.
Mr. Ketut expressed his satisfaction over the result. “We feel very secure now. With the average of 13 - 17 seconds downtime/transition time, we will have no problem when there is a hardware or system failure, and most importantly we will able to deliver our high quality service to our guests without any interruption. This is very good. Only 13 to 17 seconds downtime, wow this is really amazing!”