GoldenGate Helps Sabre Power Up Travelocity

Volume 18, Number 6
June 2004

When Sabre Holdings set out in 2001 to build the Air Travel Shopping Engine (ATSE), a new platform for air pricing and shopping functionality, the company's IT brain trust decided to diverge from its traditional technology approach. Sabre Holdings, of course, is renowned for its airline reservation network, which was the world's first computerized transaction-processing system, and for Travelocity, the groundbreaking website that set influential e-commerce standards for usability and performance in the mid-1990s.

Driven by the growth of the Internet, the dynamics between these two mainstays of the Sabre Holdings business have changed substantially in recent years. In turn, these changes have led the company to seek new technologies and new approaches to enhance its competitive position in the travel commerce market.

The Challenge: A New Approach

In years past, Sabre Holdings generally employed a "build-it-ourselves" methodology, using best-of-breed hardware and systems infrastructure, and also kept much of its application development and middleware work in-house. But with the rise of the Internet and Travelocity, Sabre Holdings has had to accommodate millions of individual online travel shoppers who create complex, high volume fare searching that is taxing on IT resources and may not yield bookings. Sabre Holdings Chief Technology Officer Craig Murphy describes the results as "an underlying shift in our business, away from working primarily with experienced travel agents to working directly with consumers."

The effect of this shift resulted in two IT goals:

• Because intuitive consumers require more complex services, Murphy and his team sought to increase the capabilities of the company's computing platforms.
• As the "look to book" ratio has gone up, they needed to reduce the overall cost of infrastructure.

The Solution: Bridging Diverse Systems With The GoldenGate Data Synchronization Platform

Once the goals were set, Murphy and his team decided to implement an infrastructure based on open systems technologies that would provide cost efficiencies and greater flexibility down the road. Using open source technologies would enable the company to achieve business goals while avoiding the proprietary trap.

Murphy and his team designed a hybrid computing environment based on a horizontally scalable server farm consisting of Linux-based commodity machines running MySQL databases. This server farm would be integrated with a cluster of HP NonStop systems. The rationale for the hybrid architecture was cost savings of using the inexpensive server farm to handle the enormous volume of low fare searches. Then came the challenge of moving the search applications and data from the production NonStop machines to the Linux/MySQL server farm. To solve that problem, Sabre Holdings turned to the GoldenGate Data Synchronization Platform.

The Results: Delivering Superior Customer Service While Cutting Costs

"The data from the airlines on flight destinations, scheduling, pricing and availability status is all fed to the master database on our NonStop platform," said Alan Walker, vice president of Sabre Labs. "With GoldenGate, we are able to capture that data, transform it for the MySQL databases and then pump it to the Linux servers." The GoldenGate solution is configured to capture and replicate only the data needed to support the Sabre-developed applications running low fare search, bulk itinerary pricing, alternate airport searching and alternate date searching. Since air-shopping transactions are stateless and "read only," none of the data on the Linux servers needs to be recovered if a box fails, eliminating the need for backup.

Sabre Holdings initially deployed the ATSE platform on the NonStop cluster in Summer 2002. In July 2003, the company brought the server farm online with an initial implementation of HP Unix machines and eventually replaced those machines with Linux machines. With GoldenGate linking the server farm to the NonStop cluster, Sabre has been able to support data flow rates averaging 300,000 updates per hour.

As fare search traffic increases, Sabre will be able to scale to meet demand simply by adding more boxes to its server farm. The company expects to reach one hundred servers over the next year.

Murphy concludes: "GoldenGate was such an important element in this initiative because it provided the glue that let us migrate and move data and evolve into the future."

About GoldenGate

A leader in Data Synchronization, the GoldenGate platform enables companies to capture, transform, move and migrate data in real time across the enterprise to support initiatives such as business continuity, application integration, data migration, and real-time data warehousing.

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