The Right Mix of Hosting, Storage and Security

– Brian Stillwell, senior director, solutions management, IT outsourcing, at Savvis, a CenturyLink company (www.savvis.com), says:

Posadas operates more than 102 hotel properties and 17,000 guestrooms in more than 50 different beach and urban destinations. The Mexico-based company provides a wide range of services to ensure its guests are met with fast and friendly service and its operations run smoothly.

It operates five unique hotel brands, including Live Aqua, Fiesta Americana Grand, Fiesta Americana, Fiesta Inn, and Hoteles One.

Posadas needed a more flexible, reliable and secure IT platform to help it manage a corresponding growing amount of data. As the business grows, the size of the information within its in-house data center also expands. The IT group found the costs required to manage the data becoming prohibitive. Meanwhile, the company expressed interest in implementing disaster recovery initiatives to recover lost data.

Posadas desired to outsource these IT requirements in order to avoid taking on additional permanent IT staff. The company also wanted to gain cost savings through the economies of scale that come with choosing a sophisticated outsourcer that would be able to combine multiple services.

Posadas chose to work with Savvis, a CenturyLink company and an IT and could infrastructure leader. The hotel operator chose a full range of services, including managed hosting, storage, and dedicated servers. They chose Savvis for its ability to provide secure and available cloud-based hosting and responsive customer service. Savvis also partnered with Burstrom, a cloud infrastructure management firm, to develop an optimal cloud infrastructure implementation plan.

A core component of the infrastructure was Savvis Symphony Dedicated, a fully managed private cloud service. This solution allows enterprises such as Posadas to quickly scale its compute and storage resources in order to meet demand. Symphony Dedicated gives companies multiple public and private connection points while reducing the risks of failures.

Posadas also selected Savvis’ enterprise storage solution, which provides an accessible and scalable storage and disaster recovery platform that reduces the cost of ownership for enterprises of any kind. The solution reduces IT and management team and salaries while providing instant accessibility for any authorized user who needs to review, process or collect information.

Savvis’ managed hosting solutions allow Posadas’ staff to address its operations and improve company efficiencies instead of worrying about underlying infrastructure. Savvis’ managed hosting is an infrastructure-as-as-Service that features a dedicated service team to aid Posadas’ staff with any operational questions.

Savvis was able to quickly implement the Symphony Dedicated private cloud, seamlessly moving all of Posadas’ data center information without error. Savvis worked closely with Burstrom and Posadas to create an implementable cloud strategy in less than 120 days.

In order to protect against disaster, Posadas also chose enterprise storage from Savvis, providing the company with a safe repository for a massive amount of hotel-specific data, including information about all 102 properties and guest and marketing lists.

“We needed a cloud infrastructure provider that would be able to give us the right mix of hosting, storage and security at a reasonable cost to allow us to continue on our growth path,” said Leopoldo Toro Bala, CIO at Posadas. “Moving to the cloud is the right choice for any enterprise that wants to stay competitive, and by choosing Savvis we have become more agile and have the peace of mind of knowing our data will always be available.”