German tour operator moves business-critical IT to new fault-tolerant data center.

When alltours moved its headquarters, it also upgraded to a new data center. The German tour operator’s entire business depends on the accessibility of its systems, so the availability and reliability of the new solution was paramount.

As the largest group of independent tour operators in Germany, alltours has approximately 500 employees and annual turnover of roughly 1.5 billion euros. Its headquarters is located in Düsseldorf, from where alltours serves nearly two million travelers per year. 

Overview


Company Alltours GmbH
Industry Travel, Hospitality and Logistics
Products used QFX SeriesEX SeriesEX4300
Region EMEA
Alltours Image
Customer Success At-a-glance

Migrated to its new data center seamlessly

Critical customer applications make use of the new network

Network is highly resilient and can be upgraded in-service

Scalable data center solution able to grow over time

Challenge

 

To increase the availability and scalability of company IT systems, alltours moved its business-critical IT equipment into a new data center, requiring a green-field build-out of network infrastructure. alltours’ entire business is dependent on the accessibility of its systems by its customers, so the availability and reliability of the solution was paramount. Its central databases, booking systems, and website rely on the network infrastructure. Its call center, which is run over VoIP, is also dependent on the new data center, as all of its gateways are located in the data center.

alltours had deployed Juniper Networks firewalls previously, and on the recommendation of Juniper’s local partner Concentrade, it had gone on to deploy them throughout its entire network. Concentrade also suggested alltours look at Juniper’s switching solution for its new data center infrastructure. alltour then began a thorough evaluation of Juniper’s data center switching capabilities. Fault tolerance and high availability were the most important criteria. It was also essential that all the architectural components of the network would work well together, and would be easy to maintain and operate with zero downtime, even during software upgrades.

alltour Challenge
Solution

 

alltours selected Juniper Networks to build out its new data center infrastructure with an end-to-end network solution. It deployed a network which was designed to be fault tolerant and also provide completely hitless hardware and software upgrades with no impact on business communication. The solution was designed in such a way that it wouldn’t even suffer from outages during planned maintenance windows.

For its new network infrastructure, alltours deployed Juniper QFX Series switches using multichassis link aggregation (MC-LAG), and EX Series Ethernet Switches, which were used for top-of-rack deployment as Virtual Chassis. The QFX Series switches allow alltours to support both 10GbE and 40GbE interfaces with space for future growth. Using multiple QFX Series systems also means that any single system can be taken offline and upgraded with no impact to any other systems.

alltour Solution
Outcome

 

All alltours critical customer applications now use the new network, from the central travel booking process to its VoIP call-centre. The migration was challenging, as alltours had to transition to its new data center in a single night. Concentrade ensured that the process went smoothly, and by the morning, everything was working seamlessly.

“Things change fast in our market,” Sven Joost says. “A new program or idea can arrive in the market very quickly and we have to be able to react and keep pace—so we need an infrastructure that can be just as flexible—coping with new systems, applications, or rapidly adding capacity. We chose the right partner and the right technology. If we had to go through the process again, we would do exactly the same thing.”

alltour Outcome
Sven Joost, Group Leader IT, alltours
"We are in the tourist brokerage market, where our customers are looking for immediate responses to their requests. The IT infrastructure may be hidden, but any issues affect our entire business; any packet loss or delay is critical to our revenues."
Sven Joost IT Group Leader, alltours

Published February 2016