Kempinski Hotel Mall of the Emirates builds on HP reliability

It chose HP servers, PCs and printers, delivered by local reseller, NTS. The proposed solutions met Kempinski's strict benchmarks. The Kempinski Hotel Mall of the Emirates is a unique deluxe five-star hotel located in Dubai, attached to the United Arab Emirate's first indoor ski resort and the biggest shopping mall outside of North America.

Built from the ground up

Built in partnership by Kempinski Hotels and Majid Al Futtaim Investments, it is located on the prestigious Sheikh Zayed Road and is a spectacular development, built to the highest specifications.

This includes the crucial IT hardware infrastructure, which features reliable servers to run the mission critical hotel applications; robust PCs and printers to ensure staff productivity; and stylish notebook PCs to complement the luxury of the hotel's guest rooms and to accommodate conference facilities.

Trusted partners

HP equipment scored highest for reliability, which was a fundamental requirement for the hotel. Furthermore, Kempinksi trusted HP based on previous successes, explains Prasanna Rupasinghe, IT manager for the Kempinski Hotel, Mall of the Emirates: "HP is our standard now. Based on past experience, we have found HP to be the most reliable and compatible compared to other server vendors, for mission critical systems in the hospitality industry. We especially like the ProLiant DL380 model coupled with reliable HP high availability cluster solution which blends perfectly with Oracle 9i Real Application Clusters and we'll be sticking with that from now on."

NTS managed the supply of all the HP hardware, which comprised: 15 HP ProLiant DL380 servers; 3
MSA 1000 Storage Arrays, 3 HP Racks, 115 HP Compaq dc7600 small form factor business PCs (each with a mix of 17-inch TFT screen and CRT screens); 27 HP Compaq nx6220 Notebook PCs; plus a number of HP LaserJet 1320n, LaserJet 2420n, LaserJet 4250n, LaserJet 9050dn and Color LaserJet 5500dn, 2500n and 3700n printers.

All of this had to be fully integrated with a number of different hotel applications and key business mechanisms which required NTS to collaborate closely with many different parties in order to get everything up and running within a matter of weeks.

Configured for reliability

The HP ProLiant servers have been deployed in a data centre on the third floor of the hotel. Dual clusters are used to support the Property Management System which operates on Oracle 9i RAC with four servers in total. Separate clustered solutions support the Point of Sale System and File and Print Services and a series of additional servers run domain controllers, interfaces, Mobile Communication, Email and collaboration software, the financial management system and other applications.

This cluster arrangement provides high availability by allowing the operations of any one server to fail over to another should a problem occur. All the servers are equipped with dual processors and redundant hardware within the servers for maximum availability and efficiency in operation. In keeping with the rest of the Kempinski Hotel, it is working perfectly, confirms Rupasinghe: "The hotel has been 95 per cent occupied since it opened, and we have had zero downtime over that period. We are very happy with the reliability and availability that HP technology provides with our stride towards 99.999% availability."