Carnival Cruise Lines Customer profile slashes server footprint by around 60 percent Company Carnival Cruise Lines Industry Travel, Hospitality and Tourism Country United States Employees 43,000 Web site www.carnival.com

Business need Each Carnival Cruise Lines ship operates as a self-sufficient environment in which power and floor space are limited, making IT efficiency a critical requirement.

Solution Carnival began virtualizing shipboard servers using VMware® vSphere™ running on ™ PowerEdge™ servers with Intel® Xeon® processors and Dell EqualLogic™ storage arrays.

Benefits • Approximately 60% reduction in physical footprint of servers on ships • 100% availability for shipboard virtual servers over past 6 months • Shoreside management possible for storage arrays on ships at sea

Application areas • Consolidation “We do everything possible to ensure that our • Dell Systems Management • Green Computing guests enjoy their vacations. By providing • Power & Cooling a highly reliable server environment, our • Services • Storage virtual machines support that mission.” • Virtualization

John Staker, Senior Information Systems Manager, Carnival Dream Customers of Carnival Cruise Lines want to get away from it all. Whether they choose to dance into the wee hours, play miniature golf with the kids or just read a great book by the pool, most are looking for a vacation from the complexities of everyday life. Paradoxically, the company’s fun and carefree cruises rely on a cutting-edge and highly efficient IT infrastructure to run smoothly.

“Our ships carry as many as 4,500 guests at servers and determine how it could use a time, so paper-and-pencil management virtualization to meet its consolidation doesn’t cut it,” says Doug Eney, vice goals. Its 22 ships rotate through dry dock president, information systems engineering so that each gets a complete overhaul for Carnival. “When guests come on board, every few years or so. Starting with the ships we need to have their cabin prepared the that were on dry dock at the time, Carnival way they want it. When they arrive at dinner, began implementing VMware vSphere the wine they requested needs to be on server virtualization and Dell EqualLogic their table. And when they disembark at a destination, their shoreside activities need to be exactly as their reservations specify. “We initially Technology at work All the logistics that make a vacation selected the go smoothly need to be transparent to Services our guests. Making that happen requires PowerEdge R900 Dell™ Consulting Services excellent, reliable technology.” servers because Hardware Destination: efficient and effective IT ™ of their .” Every ship in the Carnival Cruise Lines Dell EqualLogic PS6010XV, PS6010XVS, PS6000XV, fleet is its own floating island, which poses PS6000E and PS5000XV storage unique challenges for IT. “A cruise ship is Rodney Orange, Supervisor arrays of Wintel Server Engineering, completely self-contained,” says Eney. “It ™ ® Carnival Cruise Lines carries its own water and generates its with Intel ™ own electricity. The physical footprint of Core 2 Duo processors hardware devices is a huge issue on a ship. Dell OptiPlex™ desktop Reliability is also crucial. If something breaks computers with Intel processors on the ship, it has to be fixed on the ship; Dell PowerEdge™ R710, R900 hardware vendors aren’t going to send new and 2950 servers with Intel parts by helicopter. Our systems must be Xeon® processors both highly available and highly efficient.” One 19 all-in-one A few years ago, each ship in the Carnival desktop computers with ™2 Duo processors line required between 13 and 22 physical servers, with direct-attached storage, to Software run the various applications that support operations. “We had one server for each Dell EqualLogic SAN job, so those systems were taking up a lot of HeadQuarters floor space,” says Rodney Orange, supervisor Oracle® 10g databases of Wintel server engineering. “We needed Red Hat Linux to reduce the physical, power and cooling footprint of each ship’s IT infrastructure.” VMware® vSphere™ Windows Server® 2008 and 60% smaller server footprint 2003 Carnival engaged Dell Consulting Services to help evaluate its utilization of shipboard

2 virtual storage solutions. The first ships Plus, if a virtual server is running slowly, we saw their server footprint consolidated to can add another processor, double the 22 virtual machines hosted on three Dell RAM, add more disk space-do whatever PowerEdge R900 servers supported by two we need to do-without physically opening EqualLogic PS5000XV SANs. More recently, up the box.” ships have begun receiving Dell PowerEdge R710 servers with EqualLogic PS6000XV or IT staff effectiveness has increased, as PS6000E SANs. IS managers move between ships as frequently as every six months. Previously, “We initially selected the PowerEdge R900 when each ship had different hardware, servers because of their chipset,” says an IS manager would require time to get Orange. “But we’ve found that although up to speed after a transfer. In the virtual the PowerEdge R710 servers have a smaller environment, management of virtual footprint, they can hold as many virtual machines, as well as server and storage machines as the R900 servers, if not more.” hardware, is very similar between ships. “Across our fleet, Fifteen of the company’s ships now run a “When I come into a new situation, I can the combination virtual environment; the entire fleet will be focus on what needs to be done without upgraded by the end of 2011. having to reinvent the wheel every time,” of VMware running says Staker. “It’s fantastic.” On the upgraded ships, efficiencies on efficient Dell abound. Now, the critical applications Carnival uses EqualLogic SAN servers with and services for the ship, including HeadQuarters software to monitor Microsoft Exchange, run on the virtualized, performance of the shipboard storage EqualLogic storage consolidated Dell platform. “Now that arrays from a data center in Miami. “We we’ve gone virtual, we’re saving floor have roughly 60 EqualLogic SANs, most arrays is proving space, saving power and getting better air of which are in motion at any given to be a green flow, which keeps the servers cooler,” says time,” says John Ashmore, manager of John Staker, senior information systems systems engineering. “But EqualLogic SAN solution, while also manager on the new ship Carnival Dream. HQ enables us to look at all our storage “We’ve reduced the physical footprint of platforms from one centralized location.” greatly reducing our servers by 60 percent.” the cost of running From the shoreside data center, the IT staff “Across our fleet, the combination of monitors alerts and storage utilization. our ships’ critical VMware running on efficient Dell servers When necessary, they also plan capacity with EqualLogic storage arrays is proving increases for the SANs. “One thing we applications.” to be a green solution, while also greatly particularly like about Dell EqualLogic reducing the cost of running our ships’ storage is its ability to scale incrementally,” Doug Eney, Vice President, critical applications,” says Eney. says Ashmore. “We can add both storage Information Systems capacity and controller capacity to Engineering, Simplified IT management generate additional I/O with a single unit.” Carnival Cruise Lines IT staff are also saving time they previously spent on system administration. Driven by High-availability data centers at sea a combination of storage automation and The virtualized server and storage platform intelligence of the EqualLogic SANs and also helps Carnival deliver high availability advanced vStorage API integration with and redundancy for its isolated floating data VMware vSphere, Carnival’s virtualization centers. Using vSphere’s vCompute and solution is able to extend efficiency across vStorage features backed up by an iSCSI the entire IT infrastructure. SAN, Carnival can achieve highly reliable production environments. In addition, with “Management of our servers is greatly EqualLogic auto-replication, the SANs have simplified,” says Staker. “We no longer have a local recovery option built in. to spend time going through logs for each server. VMware vCenter enables us to see, “We’re also taking advantage of the in one place, everything that’s happening. software features that are included at

3 no extra cost with the Dell EqualLogic hardware is end-of-life and the disk array iSCSI network than over our Fibre Channel.” platform, including snapshotting and cannot support Carnival’s projected short- Better yet, Eney adds: “Over the next five replication for disaster recovery,” says term growth. Dell Consulting Services years, this data warehouse migration Ashmore. “Most of our ships have a third performed a six-week proof-of-concept will save us hundreds of thousands of EqualLogic array, kept in a separate room, using PowerEdge R710 servers running dollars that we would otherwise be to which the primary SANs replicate data. Red Hat Linux with Dell EqualLogic storage. spending on storage hardware and storage If a virtual server were to fail, we could management software.” recover it from the replicated VMware First, Dell consultants tested a 10-gigabit iSCSI virtual machines within a four-hour EqualLogic PS6010XV SAN. Performance was Dell throughout the enterprise window or less.” approximately 19 percent better than that of In two data centers, an office in London Carnival’s current production data warehouse. and shipyards in Italy, Carnival runs a So far, the Dell-based virtual infrastructure Then Dell repeated the tests using a Dell virtualization platform using Microsoft has been extremely reliable. “The storage EqualLogic PS6010XVS hybrid array, which Hyper-V running on Dell PowerEdge 2950 arrays have been rock-solid,” Staker includes both solid-state drives and spinning servers and the efficient Dell EqualLogic says. “If servers on one of our ships went disks. The hybrid array produced an additional PS5000 series SANs. These offices require down, that would impact the whole guest 16 percent performance gain, for a total 38 Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server, but experience. But the EqualLogic arrays just percent performance improvement over the their computing requirements are more run. On Carnival Dream, we’ve had 100 current environment. limited than those of the company’s data percent availability of our servers since center. “The EqualLogic SANs fit very well in their launch six months ago. We’ve never “The Dell consultants helped us realize the our remote offices,” says Eney. “Instead of had any problems with them. At Carnival advantage of the EqualLogic PS6010XVS a data center, we have a small wiring closet Cruise Lines, we do everything possible to SAN, which is that it hosts hot data on the in these locations. The Dell and EqualLogic ensure that our guests enjoy their vacation. solid-state drives while pushing cold data, platform enables us to fit the needed By providing a highly reliable server the least-used data, to the slower spinning storage and servers in a compact space.” environment, our virtual machines on Dell disks,” explains Lyn. “This ensures that the servers and EqualLogic storage support most frequently used data is served up Carnival also uses Dell client solutions that mission.” fast, but we don’t have to manage the throughout its corporate environment, movement of data between the two types including Dell Latitude laptops and Dell 38% performance improvement of storage. And the hybrid solution is much OptiPlex desktop computers for employees for data warehouse less expensive than a pure solid-state disk and Dell Studio One 19 all-in-one desktop Now Carnival is planning to move its would be. The proof-of-concept showed computers for passenger use in Carnival shoreside Oracle 10g data warehouse us that the Dell solution can save us 60 Dream’s Fun Hub, comprised of a ship- onto a similar platform of Dell PowerEdge to 80 percent compared with the high- specific intranet and the cruise industry’s servers and Dell EqualLogic storage arrays. end enterprise storage options we were first shipboard social network. “Our data warehouse is very important to considering, and 40 to 60 percent compared us,” says Garth Lyn, Supervisor, UNIX and with our midrange enterprise options.” Dell: a true partner Storage Engineering with Carnival. “We “We have a true partnership with Dell,” Eney use business intelligence software to The proof-of-concept sold Carnival on concludes. “Many vendors have walked in crunch information in our data warehouse, the benefits of moving to iSCSI even here and said they’re our partner, but then analyzing what’s happening on our cruises, in a data center that already had Fibre we’ve had a problem when the presales how guests are spending their time and Channel connectivity. “We already had period was over and the partnership went what’s going on in the travel industry. This Fibre Channel in our data center, but the out the window. Dell delivers cost-effective helps us effectively price our cruises, so it cost of expanding the platform to increase and reliable solutions, and whenever we’ve gives us a distinct competitive advantage.” our storage capacity drove us to use iSCSI,” brought up issues with the Dell team, says Ashmore. “What’s great about the they’ve determined the root cause and The data warehouse has been running on a Dell EqualLogic PS6010 series is that with worked with us on the solution. They legacy Sun Solaris-based system supported 10-gigabit Ethernet as a standard, always show a commitment to actually by EMC Symmetrix storage, but the server we actually have faster transport over an being our partner.”

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