Back up or pack up

Louise Durack.

When a leading Gold Coast hotel group expanded to include a second hotel across the road, the necessity to have a new reliable data back-up facility was essential.

Gold Coast International Hotel (GCI) is a five-star, high-rise resort, located 50 metres from Surfers Paradise beach. The hotel caters for holidaymakers and conferences with 296 rooms and conference facilities, which accommodate 750 guests.

Its sister hotel, Paradise Resort, is a 3.5-star, two-hectare, 496-room family resort, close to beaches, attractions and the heart of Surfers Paradise.

Both hotels are open for business 24 hours a day, receiving guests and taking bookings from interstate and overseas.

The GCI network supports more than 60 users, while 50 staff use Paradise Resort.

Businesses such as hotels require constant access to bookings software, IP surveillance cameras, customer details and point of sale, to service customers and deal with incoming enquiries from different time zones.

Group IT co-ordinator for GCI and Paradise Resort in Queensland, Richard Crighton, said reliable IT infrastructure is especially critical for customer satisfaction and to protect business continuity.

To ensure the smooth running of the IT facility, quick re-store of data in the instance of network failure, to ensure customer information, security information and infrastructure at both hotels, Crighton is on call 24 hours a day to troubleshoot any problems.

“If something goes wrong with the network, I get calls constantly until it is fixed. Technology is such a big part of our business,” Crighton said.

“Staff need access to systems and information quickly to answer customer questions, check in guests and make new reservations.”
GCI’s legacy back-up system was run on tape and an aging back-up server, which was running out of room.

This system was put in place to ensure protection of mission-critical data such as reservations information, customer details, security footage, sales/billing information and electronic room key programming.

However, due to the potential for tape to corrupt, Crighton wanted to move to a storage solution that was more resilient and easily expandable.

“With the quick expansion and adding a new site across the road with a WAN connection we had to look at one solution,” Crighton said.

“Our back-up window was too long and required too much management,” he said. “We really needed to reduce man hours for disaster recovery.

“The tape system was really unreliable and taking nine hours to complete back-up calculations. So we needed to increase our storage capacity and allow concurrent back up.”

“I’m not a big fan of tape. It can degrade over time, and if a tape back-up failed when we needed it most, both businesses would be in a pretty bad situation.”