Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Korean Hotel Migrates from Oracle to SQL Server 2005 to Maintain Competitive Edge
Overview
Country or Region:South Korea
Industry:Retail - Lodging
Customer Profile
Based in Seoul, South Korea, the Lotte Hotel chain provides state of the art facilities and impeccable personalized services for some of the most prestigious guests in the world.
Business Situation
Lotte Hotel needed to centralize and integrate IT systems that were deployed at its individual hotels.
Solution
After evaluating Microsoft®SQL Server® 2005 and Oracle 10g, Lotte decided to create its next-generation solution using the Microsoft Application Platform including SQL Server 2005.
Benefits
Increased reliability and stability
Increased efficiency with real-time analysis of enterprisewide data
Increased efficiency of IT staff / “We found that SQL Server 2005 can play a key role in providing the optimal IT infrastructure for our hotel business . . .”
Kyong-hoon Kim, Manager of Hotel IS Team, SM Business Division, Lotte Data Communications Company
Lotte Hotel, one of the leading names in the Korean hotel industry, needed to centralize an IT infrastructure that had been distributed to the hotels in its chain. The company had found it difficult to integrate data from its distributed operations and bring it together in a timely fashion to support business intelligence (BI). Lotte Hotel decided to replace its old system, which used an Oracle database and replace it with a centralized solution using the Microsoft® Application Platform, including Microsoft SQL Server® 2005. Lotte Hotel’s new solution, called the IT Infrastructure Generation Change project, has provided the company with increased reliability and stability. The company has also benefitted from real-time BI analysis of centralized enterprise-wide data, and increased efficiency for its IT staff.
Situation
The biggest competitive point of the hotel industry is service quality. As the competition to attract customers becomes more intense, the direction of business management innovation has no alternative but to concentrate on service quality.
Competitive characteristics for service quality in the hotel industry are focusing on various marketing programs that stimulate demand through sensitivity to customers. The era for competing with quality of service based merely on simple accommodation facilities and food/beverage has gone. It is being replaced by a new era based ona customer-oriented marketing mix that satisfies the full customer experience.
This change in market environment directly influences trends in hotel technology infrastructure. Hotel IT infrastructure generally consists of front-end business systems including reservations and customer management; and back-end systems including finance, accounting, human resources, and planning.
This structure is suitable for automating of hotel management and customer support work. However, it is not suitable for real-time analysis of business information and reflecting them across a range of marketing and sales activities.
Lotte Hotel had taken early steps toward a more flexible IT infrastructure when in 1999 it converted from a mainframe-based to a Web-based environment centered on the Windows NT®operating system and Oracle 8i database software. The solution included deployment of individual IT systems in its hotel locations including Seoul, Cheju, Pusan and Ulsan.
But Lotte Hotel saw the need to further change its IT infrastructure to be more dynamic. Lotte Hotel needed to implement a new IT environment to go beyond simple work automation and achieve customer-oriented service and quality business support.
Kyong-hoon Kim, Manager of the Hotel IS Team, SM Business Division, Lotte Data Communications Company, which administers and manages Lotte Hotel’s IT service, spoke of the challenges the organization faced, including difficulties in work processes.
“With our distributed systems, we began to experience difficulties in work processes including customer management, planning and sales,” Kim says. “Because customer information was processed by each branch, it was difficult for the head office to integrate and manage data, causing limitations to enterprisewide real-time information analysis and making it difficult to provide business management strategy support.”
In the old environment, in order to collect customer or business information in the center, data from each branch office was imported and manipulated. Kim notes: “Since we had to take many steps for data collection and manipulation, the speed of transforming data into knowledge information was naturally slow.”
In addition, the structural limitation of the system became more prominent over time. Kim says, “Since we bring all the data from each branch to the computing center located in Lotte Hotel’s Sogong-dong head office, unnecessary information began to accumulate. Moreover, the applications which ran in the Oracle environment frequently went down and it became more and more difficult to guarantee reliable front end tasks which demand high availability.”
Lotte Hotel decided to build a framework for what it termed its “next generation hotel technology infrastructure” in order to overcome the limitations of data integration and real-time analysis found in a distributed computing environment and to enhance availability.
Solution
Lotte Hotel’s IT Infrastructure Generation Change project, which began in 2006, consists of integrating distributed systems into one central data center and deploying a disaster recovery center to enhance service stability, availability and reliability.
The most important decision made during this project was selecting the database management system (DBMS). The question was: Should Lotte Hotel upgrade its Oracle environment, or should they look for an alternative suitable to their new direction?
Lotte Hotel selectedas final candidates Microsoft® SQL Server® 2005 and Oracle 10g. After evaluating both products, SQL Server 2005 was chosen. SQL Server received the high marks for reliable maintenance and cost. The new solution was deployed using SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition running on the Windows Server® 2003 Enterprise Edition operating system.
“Oracle 8i was used in the old NT 4.0 clustering environment and when failure occurred, it was not clear whether to query the OS or the DBMS,” Kim says. “In fact, we have had many experiences of not resolving critical failures. As such, we placed importance on finding clear answers in terms of maintenance.”
Kim also notes: “SQL Server 2005 was the most realistic choice since it offers similar levels of availability, stability and expandability as Oracle with a lower price and a single point for technology support requests.”
After deciding to deploy SQL Server 2005, Lotte Hotel began building the system and network structure to implement its data center and disaster recovery center. The company placed its major emphasis on achieving availability, stability and reliability. Under these goals, Lotte Hotel began to build a composite fault tolerance model using technologies of the Microsoft Application Platform and SQL Server 2005 including clustering, mirroring, and replication.
“In order to use storage-related solutions, the data center and all Lotte Hotel branches need to have similar disk equipment to copy the data as a whole,” Kim says. “Lotte Hotel required synchronizing of the data needed by each branch. To filter data needed by its branches, it was appropriate for Lotte Hotel to use a mirroring or replication function from the DBMS engine layer.”
Lotte was impressed with the Microsoft Application Platform. “We found that SQL Server 2005 can play a key role in providing the optimal IT infrastructure for our hotel business, without making unnecessary investments,” says Kim.
With the decision to use SQL Server in deploying its data center and disaster recovery center, Lotte Hotel introduced Intel Itanium-based Unisys ES7000 server computers tohost its integrated DBMS and application server in its data center located in Kasan-dong and the disaster recovery center located in Sogong-dong. Lotte Hotel used Microsoft Windows® Clustering Services to complete its clustering environment, providing its first level of fault tolerance. Also, for DBMS synchronizing between the data center and disaster recovery center, it used the Database Mirroring feature of SQL Server 2005.
The result was that Lotte Hotel succeeded in integrating systems that were distributed and operated in each branch into one central place. Lotte Hotel also took one additional step — a third level of fault tolerance. In preparation for network interruption with an integrated server located in the data center, it enabled connections between servers distributed in branches and the main system located in the data center with the Transactional Replication function of SQL Server 2005. Kim says, “Even if we prepare a perfect fault tolerance environment in the center, there are blind spots, such as when a network interruption occurs, service would stop immediately. Hence it is important to prevent front and backend business service interruptions during network failure. For this it is necessary to maintain real-time data replication between the data center and the hotel branches.”
By selecting mirroring and replication as the connection method from each branch to the data center and disaster recovery center, Lotte Hotel was able to realize its goal of achieving a multiple fault tolerant system.
Its next step was to enable users to effectively utilize the data gathered enterprisewide in one place as knowledge information required for business management. Lotte Hotel found its answer in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services.
“The Cognos Powerplay tool, which we used in the past, was too high-priced so it was expensive to upgrade,” says Kim. “SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services had no cost burden and at the same time it was a strong alternative enabling us to easily convert our existing OLAP [online analytical processing] environment, after which we applied reporting tools to create Lotte Hotel’s overall BI [business intelligence] environment.”
Benefits
Building upon the Microsoft Application Platform has helped Lotte Hotel achieve its next generation hotel technology infrastructure. The solution supportsservice quality business management through IT infrastructure generation change and reconstruction of theBI environment. The organization is especially happy with the 24X365non-stop service and enterprisewide BI innovation it has gained from upgrading its infrastructure to the Microsoft Application Platform.
Lotte Hotel has increased reliability and stability of its overall IT service and at the same time increased the value of data that is accumulated and distributed enterprisewide. These comprehensive effects are visible throughout its operations, yielding increased reliability and stability for sales-related IT service, increased efficiency with real-time analysis of enterprisewide information, and increased efficiency of IT service management staff.
Increased Reliability and Stability
The organization sees its greatest benefit from the project to be increased reliability and stability for sales related IT services. In the old IT environment, Lotte Hotel experienced frequent cases of the operating system becoming unresponsive. The IT staff identified the problem as beginning at the application level, but the result was that Lotte Hotel had to reboot its previous system every two days, making it difficult to provide a stable IT service.
“Servers for management processes including planning, human resources, and accounting can be shut down for 2 to 3 hours, but this is not possible for sales servers,” says Kim. “For example, if service response time increased to 2 seconds from 1 second, the phone would ring. Hence rebooting the system every two days was a significant problem and an added burden.”
All this changed when Lotte Hotel re-designed its IT infrastructure based on SQL Server 2005. The company is now able to achieve multi-dimensional fault tolerance and provide service without stopping its system.
Increased Efficiency with Real-Time Analysis of Enterprisewide Data
A second benefit is increased management efficiency, such as planning, finance, and accounting with real-time analysis of enterprisewide information. In the case of frontend work, such as sales-related IT support, reliability and stability have enhanced noticeably while in the general management work, employee productivity has increased.
“In the past, collecting data and making reports was time-consuming,” Kim says. “Now, it is easy to find meaningful business management information from our data and draw value from it.”
The new reporting capabilities have enhanced employee productivity. “By changing the heart of our IT infrastructure and BI environment to meet the new era, management as well as LoB [line of business] employees were able to increase their insight and visibility towards all kinds of business information. In other words, instead of simply accumulating data, everyone could easily re-create the data into information and knowledge, opening the way to a smart company.”
Increased Efficiency of IT Staff
Lotte Hotel has found that its new solution has increased efficiency of the IT service management staff. The frequent system restarts that were required with the previous solution often led to overtime work. The team also found it difficult to remotely service branch systems running on Windows NT, so maintenance staff had to go to the site when a failure occurred in a particular branch. These problems have disappeared with the deployment of the new solution based on the Microsoft Application Platform.
“Our system has been consolidated into one center enabling a single point of management, remote monitoring and problem solving,” Kim says. “As a result, it is possible to prepare responses rather than simply manage after the problem has occurred. Time and resources for server operation and administration tasks have been reduced greatly compared to the past.”
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
For more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:
Microsoft SQL Server 2005
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is comprehensive, integrated data management and analysis software that enables organizations to reliably manage mission-critical information and confidently run today’s increasingly complex business applications. By providing high availability, security enhancements, and embedded reporting and data analysis tools, SQL Server 2005 helps companies gain greater insight from their business information and achieve faster results for a competitive advantage. And, because it’s part of the Microsoft server product portfolio, SQL Server 2005 is designed to integrate seamlessly with your other server infrastructure investments.
For more information about SQL Server 2005, go to: