Carnival Cruise Lines

Cruise Line Sees Increased Availability, Smoother Sailing, with Monitoring Solution

Carnival Cruise Lines wanted to boost the availability of a Microsoft® Exchange Server deployment crucial to ship-to-shore communications, as well as boost availability on its increasingly important e-commerce Web site. It’s doing that thanks to Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007. That means smoother operations at sea, better customer service, higher revenues—and increased efficiency on the part of the IT staff.

 

Business Needs

Carnival Cruise Lines wants to send everyone on a cruise—except its IT staff.

Carnival’s 22 ships make it the largest and most popular cruise line in the world, according to the company. Carnival expects to welcome 3.6 million guests to those ships this year. And while they’re enjoying their cruise vacations, Carnival staff will work to make sure that operations run smoothly. Part of that effort means constant communication between the ships and Carnival’s Miami, Florida headquarters.

On the e-commerce side, the greater availability enabled by Operations Manager 2007 service-level monitoring will translate directly into enhanced service to users and increased revenues. Rodney Orange Supervisor, Wintel Server Engineering Team, Carnival

That ship-to-shore communication, it turns out, is handled the same way most of the rest of the world communicates: through e-mail. Carnival has long relied on Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003 and is now upgrading to the 64-bit Exchange Server 2007. It has a computer running Exchange Server on each ship, communicating over satellite with a four-node cluster in Miami. And it’s not only employees who communicate ship-to-shore using Exchange Server—even line-of-business applications such as the Shipboard Property Management System rely on Exchange Server as their communications mechanism. In all, Carnival has 800 servers running the Microsoft Windows Server® 2003 operating system across the enteprise, many of which exchange data with the 16 to 20 servers on each of the cruise line’s 22 ships.

Which makes Exchange Server mission-critical to Carnival. But the solution was running at only 90 to 95 percent availability. When problems arose with the infrastructure aboard ship, Carnival had to fly an Exchange Server specialist from its IT staff to the ship, whether the ship was sailing off Caribbean islands, Mexico, Hawaii, Alaska, or Europe (among other destinations). The specialists probably didn’t mind too much, but Carnival did—because of the expense and, even more, because the need to fly them out meant that shipboard operations could be affected, with potentially negative impact on guests.

“We wanted the Exchange Server environment to run at top efficiency,” says Rodney Orange, Supervisor of the Wintel Server Engineering Team at Carnival. “We had to be able to see and troubleshoot problems without having to fly out specialists.”

Solution

To achieve that goal, Carnival is upgrading its monitoring solution from Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 to Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007, the best-of-breed end-to-end service management solution for Windows®-based infrastructures. The company began evaluating a prerelease version of the solution in November 2006 and began production deployment with the software’s release in March 2007.

The System Center Operations Manager 2007 environment at Carnival consists of six servers: a gateway server to the DMZ to handle traffic from outside the enterprise, three root management servers, a data warehouse server, and an audit collection service (ACS) server.

To ensure a smooth transition from Operations Manager 2005 with minimal impact on the business and its users, Carnival is implementing a side-by-side migration to System Center Operations Manager 2007, with the new monitoring servers and agents operating alongside the older versions for several weeks until the company implements a cutover. “Our deployment is proceeding in a very straightforward way,” says Orange. “With Operations Manager 2007, there are no surprises.”

Carnival makes extensive use of Microsoft- and third-party management packs for their best practice knowledge to discover, monitor, troubleshoot, report on, and resolve problems for specific technologies. Orange and his colleagues are using management packs for System Center Operations Manager 2007 “out of the box;” are utilizing their investment in customized management packs by migrating them to the new monitoring solution; and expect to create their own management packs using the solution’s authoring tools.

“We can have our developers create custom management packs for their .NET solutions,” says Orange. “That will build monitoring into those solutions from the beginning, making them more effective. This is key to enabling our IT staff to keep up with the growth we expect in the number of custom applications we author and maintain.”

EMC SMARTS is also part of Carnival’s monitoring environment. To ensure smooth integration of these solutions, Carnival has used the Operations Manager 2005 EMC Connector and it is evaluating the new version of that technology.

Carnival is expanding its deployment of System Center Operations Manager 2007 beyond Exchange Server, to include its e-commerce Web site and core applications and services such as Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 and the Windows Server 2003 Active Directory® service. As with Exchange Server, the monitoring of the Web site and line-of-business applications provide full service-level monitoring.

Benefits

“MOM 2005 gave us a view into our server performance, but we wanted more,” says Orange. “We turned to Operations Manager 2007 for service-level monitoring to understand how our services are performing—and where the bottlenecks are. For example, our Exchange Server environment is highly distributed, with bridgehead servers, spam appliances, mail stores, and edge devices. When there are problems, Operations Manager 2007 will help us to pinpoint them immediately. We expect fewer problems and faster time to resolve the problems that do arise.”

Service-level monitoring of the e-commerce Web site and line-of-business applications show the comprehensive status of the services being provided, rather than just the status of individual servers. As a result Carnival gains a truer picture of service status, enabling it to make adjustments or to address problems more quickly. Service-level monitoring of the e-commerce site, for example, enables Carnival IT staff to understand how consumers are experiencing the site, so the staff can take corrective action as appropriate to ensure that consumers have a great Web experience and can purchase reservations without problems.

As a result of service-level monitoring, Orange expects Exchange Server availability to climb from 90-to-95 percent to 99 percent and availability on the e-commerce Web site to achieve nearly 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week uptime. “Those increases make huge differences to us,” says Orange. “It reduces costs for the Exchange Server team and for the help desk that has to respond to our users, and ensures smoother operations on our ships. On the e-commerce side, the greater availability enabled by Operations Manager 2007 service-level monitoring will translate directly into enhanced service to users and increased revenues.”

Carnival executives want to know how these mission-critical services are performing—and System Center Operations Manager 2007 tells them. Orange and his colleagues are creating dashboards that pull real-time reporting data from Operations Manager to give executives constantly updated statistics on service-level availability and other service-level agreement data.

Meanwhile, the use of management packs gives tier 1 helpdesk support more information regarding user issues than ever before. With that information, helpdesk personnel can more quickly resolve many problems without time-delaying escalation, and they can more quickly escalate the issues that require more in-depth support. In both cases, the solution gets users up and running more quickly.

System Center Operations Manager contributes greater knowledge of infrastructure status to Carnival in other ways, too. For example, Audit Collection Service goes beyond the corporate error reporting that Carnival has been using, to provide an in-depth log on computer and server activity that Carnival can use to help identify recurring problems, track security issues, enhance planning, and meet regulatory audit and reporting requirements.

Carnival is reducing costs and boosting IT efficiency through System Center Operations Manager 2007 in other ways too. For example, the new version of the solution lets the company consolidate what had been three Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 configuration groups into just one. The three configuration groups had been necessary to give three sets of administrators—the e-commerce team, SQL Server database administrators, and operational team—their own views into the monitoring environment. Now, role-based security groups in System Center Operations Manager 2007 accomplish those same role-specific views in a single installation. For example, database administrators only see alerts related to database operation, rather than having to pour through alerts from the entire infrastructure.

“Role-based views are a big advantage because now, when administrators see alerts, they know those alerts are relevant to them and they can take immediate action,” says Orange. “The enterprise operates more efficiently—and our administrators do, too.”