Although Solaris offered a cost improvement over the mainframes, Wiseman still thought he could do better. As a result, Cendant has swapped out the Unix systems in favor of IBM's Intel Xeon-based xSeries blade servers running Red Hat Linux 3.0. The system consists of more than 100 clustered four-way and eight-way X440 and X445 SMP blade servers.
Wiseman has forecast the new platform will reduce the cost of running its fare systems by 90 percent over three years. In addition, he estimates improving performance by taking hours off the preprocessing time to post new fares issued by airlines several times each day.
"I have become very enamored by the attractiveness of low-cost, redundant, smaller machines," Wiseman says. "You get much greater scalability, greater redundancy and a lower cost of operation. Total customer ownership is much lower."
It's not a decision a customer like Cendant tends to make lightly. Galileo processes up to 400 transactions per second and interfaces with hundreds of airlines. But Wiseman wasn't deterred. His previous employer, Orbitz.com, an online travel agency owned by a consortium of airlines, also built much of its systems on Linux. Moreover, Linux has proved itself on some of the largest Web sites, including Amazon.com and Google. And Cendant's efforts aren't alone in the airline industry. Sabre also recently began to migrate its system used by airlines, travel agents and passengers to find and book flights, from mainframe to Linux.
Cendant originally signed a 10-year, $1.4 billion managed-services deal in 2001 with IBM Global Services. For the Galileo deal, IGS took responsibility for the installation and brought in partner Peak Resources for the blade servers running Linux. According to Vince DeRose, president of Peak Resources, his team served as experts in what he calls "short circuiting" the IBM-Intel supply chain.
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