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Moving the Data Center for Kayak.com – Case Study

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Summary:  Relocation of Major Travel Web Site with Zero Downtime

The Challenge

KayakKayak 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’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. Kayak turned to TDS for help.

The TDS Approach

TDS managed the entire data center relocation process end-to-end.

  • Identified the right location, the best data center and bandwidth providers.
  • Reviewed and advised on contracts, warranties and lease agreements.
  • Designed the data center and the networks, and built the new facility.
  • Designed a robust, scalable technology architecture to protect against potential network downtime and provide a cost effective growth path.

Benefits

TDS helped Kayak achieve a 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 TDS as its data center technical operations team, responsible for all the physical equipment, the servers, switches, routers, load balancers and firewalls.  TDS 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.

About TDS

Transitional Data Services (TDS) works across industries to help enterprise class companies, global organizations and government entities embrace and maximize the power of Hybrid IT by allowing them to accelerate their migration to new cloud, platform, application and data center environments while reducing project risks and lowering overall costs.