Mantra's mantra: 'private cloud' (not 'Om')

Stephen Withers
Friday, 21 October 2011 15:58

 

Accommodation group Mantra has implemented a private cloud using VMware's FlexPod system on Cisco and NetApp hardware.

 

Rapid growth at Mantra - the company behind the Peppers, Mantra and BreakFree chains - led to the adoption of a private cloud architecture provided by Alphawest and using FlexPod for VMware on Cisco's UCS and network hardware plus NetApp storage. The use of pretested modules meant the migration was achieved in ten days.

 

The company's existing 90 servers were virtualised, and the consolidation of the central reservation system was achieved within five days with no downtime. An online reservation system was also implemented.

Despite the addition of over 100 properties as the result of Mantra's acquisition of nine hotel groups, the move to FlexPod meant no increase in the number of IT employees.

"With an increasing trend of businesses adopting on-premise private cloud solutions, Alphawest was delighted to be able to work with Mantra Group to implement an industry leading solution based on NetApp FlexPod," said Alphawest CEO Ian Smith.

"Uniquely it was one of the first deployments of end-to-end Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). As Alphawest maintains expertise across all three vendors involved, we were able to offer Mantra Group a single point of contact to build a solution that includes future scalability and redundancy on a single unified platform," he added.