Moving the Data Center for Kayak.com
Project Context and Scope
Kayak is a search engine that crawls hundreds of travel sites all over the world to provide its customers with the best options for their travel plans, enabling them to book airline tickets, find cruise destinations and schedules, make hotel reservations, arrange for car rentals, and receive travel news and updates. Kayak has become highly popular because it is easy to use and finds the lowest rates.
It was publicly launched in early 2005 and immediately began growing quickly in a highly competitive market. In August 2005, Kayak realized that its New Jersey data center that had served it well from its start-up would have to be enlarged and moved closer to headquarters near Boston. Kayak turned to TDS for help.
The TDS Approach
Kayak’s business is data. Any interruption in data processing would immediately and adversely impact operations, the user experience and revenues. Therefore, it was crucial not only that the new data center would accommodate the firm’s growth, but also that the transition from the old to the new would be seamless and flawless.
TDS managed the entire process end-to-end. We identified the right location and the best data center and bandwidth providers. We advised on contracts, designed the data center and the networks, and built the new facility. We designed a robust, scalable technology architecture to protect against potential network downtime and provide a cost effective growth path. Then we managed the zero-downtime transition, relocating an operational site from the old data center to the new one, handling all the strategy, planning and execution for the hardware, data and network.
After the relocation, Kayak retained us to be its data center technical operations team, responsible for all the physical equipment, the servers, switches, routers, load balancers and firewalls. We implemented multi-point monitoring of all the networks, switches, servers and data center monitors so that we can track, anticipate and quickly solve any infrastructure issues that arise to keep the Kayak website up and running 24/7.
Client Benefits:
By using TDS, Kayak was able to complete a successful data center relocation with zero downtime.
Kayak doubled its data center capacity and network infrastructure with a 40% reduction in cost.
With TDS, Kayak increased their technology infrastructure fourfold with only a 60% increase in technical operations cost.