Virtuoso, a luxury travel network, encompasses more than 300 travel agencies with more than 6,000 travel specialists in 22 countries. The network’s member agencies generate more than $5.1 billion annually in travel sales.
The Fort Worth, Texas, organization recently set out to modernize its data center so that it could increase its membership and reduce operating costs. “With the aim of growing revenue tenfold in the next five years, we decided to make a concerted effort to increase our membership base and improve our technology platform to support the additional members,” says CIO Joel Chaplin.
A key part of the modernization was the deployment of Liquid Computing’s LiquidIQ, a unified computing system platform that hosts Virtuoso’s Web-based services for its travel network. It replaces a complex assortment of server, network, storage and virtualization technologies that were becoming increasingly costly to manage and align in response to business needs, Chaplin says.
“With LiquidIQ, we don’t have to build bare metal from scratch,” Chaplin says. “If we have to deploy a new server, we can configure that server image and store it on the chassis—literally hundreds of [images]. If we have to overwrite one, or do a new blade, it’s already there. The administrators can push a button, and [the system] builds. We get a small data center within a chassis.”
The benefits include a reduced data center footprint and lower co-location space costs; decreased operating costs of as much as 80 percent from reductions in footprint, power consumption and administrative overhead; and huge savings on administrative time and costs.
“The platform offers us the flexibility to virtualize entire environments, if necessary, and to run dedicated physical servers where performance and availability are key—all in the same chassis,” Chaplin says.
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IT Management 
