Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. Upgrades Reservation, Guest Loyalty and Data Warehouse Systems to Oracle(r) 10g   Oracle's Infrastructure Software Offers Starwood Highly Available, Scalable and Easily Managed Foundation for Critical Business Applications   REDWOOD SHORES, Calif.   08-JUN-2006  Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc., one of the world's largest hotel and leisure companies, has upgraded to Oracle(r) 10g infrastructure software to support its critical business applications including reservation and guest loyalty, among others. Upgrading to a clustered Oracle Database 10g environment from a single-instance of Oracle9i Database is a part of the on-going migration of Starwood's mainframe applications to an open platform. The company is expecting to complete its three-year mainframe migration project by end of 2006. With approximately 850 properties in more than 95 countries and 145,000 employees at its owned and managed properties, Starwood needed a highly available and scalable information technology (IT) system to replace its mainframe-based system. To capture, confirm and track the thousands of daily online and phone reservations as well as support more than 20 million members of its Starwood Preferred Guest(r) loyalty program, Starwood relies on Oracle Database 10g Release 2, Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control (Oracle Grid Control) running on a three-node cluster of HP-UX RX8620 servers each with eight dual-core Intel Itanium(r) processors. The combination of Oracle Database 10g and HP Intel Itanium servers deliver a fault-tolerant and high performance infrastructure for Starwood's mission-critical business applications. Starwood rewrote its applications in Java to position itself for a virtually seamless introduction of incremental business functionality over time. "It was very hard to introduce change in a mainframe environment," said Bill Camp, vice president of Enterprise System Information, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. "So we've adopted a service-oriented architecture that is flexible enough to adapt to changing business requirements going forward. Having made that decision, it was natural to go with Oracle Real Application Clusters for system reliability. We experience less downtime now that the database is online on one node or the other when we perform system maintenance." The company also adopted Oracle Grid Control to manage and monitor the performance of its clustered database and applications replacing a third-party database management tool. Starwood uses the Oracle Diagnostics Pack for Database and Oracle Tuning Pack for Database in conjunction with Oracle Grid Control to extend its system management and monitoring capabilities. The Oracle Tuning Pack enables automated database application tuning processes, helping to considerably lower database management costs while enhancing performance and reliability. The Oracle Diagnostics Pack manages the performance of Oracle Database environments. "We made a conscious decision to move away from our previous management tool and establish Oracle Grid Control as the standard going forward," said Arup Nanda, director of Database Engineering and Operations, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. "Oracle Grid Control has helped us to address system management issues proactively, automate previously manual administrative tasks, and reduce the need for extensive DBA training." Data Warehouse Captures Business Details, Enables Informed Decision Making Starwood also operates a 15-terabyte Oracle data warehouse for capturing and analyzing its reservations, guest satisfaction survey responses, and group sales data. Their central data warehouse plays a key role in Starwood's ability to track key metrics, forecasting and communicate effectively with its guests. Starwood has also deployed an enterprise marketing management solution with their data warehouse to manage and track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Starwood uses Oracle Partitioning to help enhance the manageability, performance, and availability of the wide variety of applications using their large data warehouse. Specifically, Oracle Partitioning is used for:   * Archiving and backup of data by partition instead of entire tablespaces; * Moving data from expensive, high-end storage to low-cost, commodity disks; and, * Helping to increase the performance and reliability of the data warehouse. The data warehouse was upgraded to Oracle Database 10g Release 2 on a HP rp8420 server with PA-RISC processors in December 2005. About Oracle Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world's largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle, visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com. # # # Trademarks Oracle, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Siebel are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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Get Control
By David Baum

The trend is inescapable: Networks get faster, computers get more powerful, clustering technologies get more effective, and storage devices get more efficient. These advances pave the way for software applications that are more capable and intelligent, automating a diverse array of business functions. Yet for many IT managers, quantitative improvements in the IT infrastructure don't make any qualitative difference where it matters most: saving time and energy in provisioning, managing, and monitoring critical information systems.

Enterprise applications built around a service-oriented architecture (SOA) are further changing the nature of system management in areas such as configuration management, service-level management, application performance, and infrastructure management. Highly modular programs can take advantage of virtualized

The Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Universe Download pdf

This virtual world of SOA and grid computing promises tremendous flexibility for deploying and enhancing business applications, but management solutions must evolve in tandem to achieve comparable advances for IT professionals.

"Many of today's emerging applications are being created to run in highly complex multitier environments where changes at any level can impact application performance," confirms Mary Johnston Turner, a vice president at Boston-based technology research firm Summit Strategies. "These environments are both flexible and dynamic," Turner adds, "but because the tiers are so tightly interconnected, managing them has become much more complex."

Oracle is helping companies manage the multitier complexity of their IT environments. "Our investment in Oracle Enterprise Manager complements our strong technology and application products, allowing customers to improve service quality and adopt new technology innovations while controlling management costs," says Oracle President Charles Phillips. "Oracle Grid Control is the centerpiece of this solution and a key enabler in the adoption of grid computing and service-oriented architectures."

Adopting the Grid

Starwood is basing its online environment and underlying database on Oracle Database 10g Release 2. The company has a 5TB Oracle database running on a three-node cluster orchestrated with Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC). Starwood's application portfolio includes distribution, content management, and marketing, in addition to the reservation and customer-loyalty systems, Web sites, and call center. The hospitality chain processes billions of dollars in bookings per year through its Oracle-based information systems. Oracle Enterprise Manager helps make it possible.

"Our goal is 99.999 percent availability, which is one of the reasons we have made Oracle RAC and Oracle Enterprise Manager software our standard going forward," says Arup Nanda, director of database engineering at Starwood. "We use the Oracle Grid Control software within Oracle Enterprise Manager for automatic grid monitoring, space management, performance monitoring, and alerting DBAs. It gives us a single point of focus for our Oracle-based systems."

Starwood finds Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 2 to be ideal for managing a grid-based infrastructure because it reveals so much information in the browser, especially cluster-interconnect information from Oracle RAC. "The SGA-attach feature of the [Oracle] Enterprise Manager interface allows us to get to the database and retrieve key performance numbers from the SGA directly, without logging in and using a SQL interface," Nanda explains. "This allows us to resolve issues quickly. For us, it was one of the key reasons to implement Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g [Release] 2."

SOA keeps the system dynamic. "We're adopting a service-oriented architecture based on Oracle technology because it is much more flexible adapting to changing business requirements," Camp says. "Having made that decision, it was natural to go with Oracle's management tools as well."

Finding better ways to manage information—easily, securely, and at the lowest possible cost—was a key design goal for Oracle Database 10g. Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g takes advantage of instrumentation and data collection technologies built into the internals of Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle E-Business Suite and couples that with end-to-end service-level management capabilities to continually monitor the status and health of any application.

"The self-managing capabilities of Oracle Database 10g fully automate or significantly simplify many routine functions, enabling database administrators to easily optimize performance, manage backups, and perform other day-to-day tasks faster than ever before," says Moe Fardoost, director of marketing for Oracle Enterprise Manager. "In complex environments containing many moving parts, with constantly changing workloads, automated management is essential to maintaining costs."

These comprehensive system management capabilities have been essential to Advance America, the largest provider of payday cash-advance services in the United States. The company operates more than 2,600 cash-advance centers in 37 states and is adding about 400 centers per year.

Several years ago, Advance America implemented an enterprise software application called the eAdvantage system to handle critical business functions such as collecting customer information, processing new cash advances, and servicing existing ones. Initially this application was based on a distributed Sybase environment, with 2,000+ branch databases replicating information to a master corporate database on a nightly basis. As the company grew, the complexity of this environment caused delays that affected internal and external operations.

"Even with all servers working at maximum capacity, we no longer had a sufficient window for processing all this transactional data overnight," recalls David Toothman, CIO at Advance America. "Our distributed database environment could no longer sustain the business, let alone handle growth."

Advance America needed an infrastructure that would expand and scale as business grew—without requiring a corresponding increase in IT management cost and complexity. Toothman and his colleagues adopted Oracle Database 10g, Oracle RAC, and Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g. Together with Oracle Consulting, they implemented a grid-computing environment that effectively operates as a single system.

"One of the key benefits of Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Real Application Clusters is its ability to pass information to the application server tier about the load on and availability of particular nodes," says Randy Hietter, director of product management for Oracle RAC. "The middle tier can intelligently route connection requests to the least busy node. In that way, the middle tier and database tier are functioning as a cooperative computing grid, dynamically exchanging information about their status so as to maximize the utilization and performance of grid resources."

Thanks to Oracle RAC and Oracle Enterprise Manager, Advance America's Oracle grid is reliable and can be expanded by adding nodes to meet expanding workloads. "The new system architecture has proven to be much more reliable by eliminating single points of failure," Toothman says. "In six months of production processing, we have had zero unplanned downtime for the database. The environment is also much more scalable, giving us the ability to add capacity on demand in a very cost-effective way."

At Advance America, consolidation and management capabilities make a difference on the front lines: where people and systems interact. According to Sanjay Bamba, the company's director of database services, consolidating their infrastructure to a clustered database system has significantly reduced management costs. His IT staff can perform information loads and roll-ups about two hours faster with the consolidated grid system—a 25 percent improvement. Meanwhile, at the cash-advance centers, daily reports are produced more quickly and are available three to four hours earlier—a 50 percent improvement.

"Instead of maintaining more than 2,000 decentralized databases—with their recurring upgrade, support, and management costs—requests from each cash-advance center are directed to a service running on all four nodes of the Oracle RAC cluster," Bamba says. "This allows us to adjust the resources available to each group of clients as the workload fluctuates. It's working beautifully."

Advance America has discovered another advantage of deploying Oracle Enterprise Manager software: Oracle Clusterware eliminates the need for costly third-party software. "Oracle Grid Control provides us with a single solution for monitoring the whole cluster—a centralized place to look at the health of our system," says Bamba. "We don't have to consult multiple utilities to determine if things are working well. We use it for performance analysis, job scheduling, resource monitoring, and to keep an eye on our physical-standby environment. With [Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g] Release 2, we're able to monitor our environment through new service and system dashboards, and everyone gets what they need: service-level information for business users and system information for administrators. We gain economies of scale as we bring more activities under the Oracle Enterprise Manager umbrella," he continues. "In a multitier computing environment, the Oracle software allows us to do more with less."

While numerous third-party management tools are available, few of them can supply the aggregated information you need to make intelligent decisions—particularly when multiple servers and databases are involved. To help system administrators gain a thorough understanding of database management in Oracle grid environments, Oracle has introduced Oracle Diagnostic Pack and Oracle Tuning Pack, specialized management utilities that complement and extend Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control software.

"We have to provide 24/7 support for our databases, and we needed a tool that would let us know if there is a problem, so we could be on top of it right away," says Susan Szot, manager of the Corporate Information Technology Metro DBA team at Pfizer, the world's largest research-based pharmaceutical company. "We tried several kinds of monitoring tools, with various degrees of success. [Oracle] Enterprise Manager Grid Control had the most promise, so we started a pilot. Now we use the software to monitor all of our databases, in conjunction with the Oracle Diagnostics Pack and Oracle Tuning Pack."

Szot and her team of 15 DBAs use Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10g to manage 30 terabytes of Oracle data housed in 900 Oracle databases on an Oracle grid consisting of 250 servers—a mixture of Sun Solaris and Microsoft Windows computers.

Pfizer primarily uses Oracle9i Database and is moving toward Oracle Database 10g for all its production systems. Formerly, they depended on third-party tools to manage these information systems, but Szot says the software didn't scale well and lacked insight into the Oracle product stack. As a result, Pfizer had to use several software products to monitor and maintain its IT systems.

Today, Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control gives Pfizer one central management utility for streamlining and automating a wide variety of tasks. According to Bala Palayam, a DBA team lead at Pfizer, Oracle Diagnostic Pack is especially useful for troubleshooting. It includes a diagnostic engine built into the Oracle Database kernel, enabling Oracle Enterprise Manager to continually collect metrics and information about the performance of the database environment. If a user complains about performance, a couple of clicks in a GUI-based diagnostic console often reveal the problem.

"In the past, we couldn't tell if we had a problem with the database, the network, or something else, so we had to dispatch a team of people to figure out what was going on," says Palayam. "It might take all day. Now, Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control can tell us if something happened with the database before we get all these other people involved. For example, if a user drops an index, which causes a runaway query, we can pinpoint the problem in 10 minutes."

All of these issues become more pronounced in complex environments, since Pfizer is managing not just individual servers but a shared virtualized infrastructure. "Gradually, we are learning to use Oracle Enterprise Manager to manage and monitor not just the database but the underlying infrastructure," Szot says.

Pfizer uses the Oracle Tuning Pack to improve application performance via better SQL query management. "If a SQL query is chewing up a lot of CPU time, Oracle Enterprise Manager can often identify why," says Palayam. "For example, it can reveal a hanging process and even kill the process right away to free up the database. The culprit might be the number of sessions or how particular processes are being executed."

While Oracle Enterprise Manager can take corrective action when needed, Pfizer prefers to be alerted to problems and advised about solutions—then fix the actual problems themselves. The exception comes with analyzing database schemas and tables—a tedious process when you are dealing with 900 databases. "Before, we'd have to set up dozens of individual jobs to do that," Szot says. "Now we can automate it all through Oracle Enterprise Manager. What used to be a 30-hour job can now be accomplished in just two or three hours."

Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control also improves security with respect to Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. "Because we have all of our databases hooked to Oracle Enterprise Manager, we have a centralized way of running security scripts," Szot says.

Palayam appreciates Oracle Enterprise Manager's Web-based architecture, since it means Pfizer does not have to install so much desktop software to manage the grid. "All you do is point administrators to a URL to access all of the management functions," he explains. "It is downward-compatible, so we can use it to monitor Oracle Database 10g, Oracle9i Database, Oracle8i Database, and even to monitor Microsoft SQL Server databases."

Pfizer has integrated Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control with Oracle Recovery Manager (Oracle RMAN), which streamlines the process of scheduling database backups. "Oracle management utilities are helping us to centralize security, backup, monitoring, and maintenance activities, as well as to integrate our backup strategy with our monitoring strategy," Szot says. "We've only scratched the surface, yet already this software is solving our current problems and getting us ready for the future. We are less reliant on third-party management tools and we've eliminated some third-party tools from our environment. I think it's only going to get better."

Flexibility with Oracle RAC

Just as the added functionality of Oracle Diagnostics and Tuning Packs extend the core capabilities of Oracle Enterprise Manager, Oracle RAC enhances database configurations. With Oracle RAC, Oracle Database 10g runs on two or more servers in a cluster that concurrently access a single shared database. This configuration extends flexibility and scalability to the business applications that use Oracle databases, since administrators can add additional server and storage resources as needed. This configuration is also more reliable: If one server or storage device encounters a problem, the other devices in the cluster will continue to carry the load.

"[Oracle] RAC addresses unplanned outages, with extensive data protection and disaster recovery capabilities, which helps us sustain business continuity," says Starwood's Nanda.

This architecture was appealing to Replacements, a specialty retailer with an inventory of 10 million pieces of tableware in more than 200,000 patterns. The company has been using Oracle technology since 1994 to power its inventory system. In 2005, Replacements deployed an enterprise grid infrastructure comprised of Oracle 10g software.

"After extensive testing, we determined that Oracle RAC is a more reliable and robust structure than a single-instance failover model, as we had been using before," says Jim Meredith, IT manager at Replacements. "And because we use commodity hardware, the equipment costs us less as well."

Replacements uses Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g to automate DBA tasks, and the Web console supplies insight into every aspect of service performance, so they can more easily troubleshoot problems. The IT staff is also using Oracle Automatic Storage Management to simplify storage management activities, which has eliminated the need for third-party cluster file system software.

"All of the storage for the database is controlled through Oracle Enterprise Manager and related utilities," says Meredith. "For example, database backups are controlled and managed through Oracle Recovery Manager. We also use the paging and notification facilities within Oracle Enterprise Manager to detect potential problems, such as if resource use exceeds a certain threshold. If configurable thresholds such as 'run queue length' or 'session count' are exceeded, Oracle Enterprise Manager can bring up another instance of the service on another node. It works very well."

An Inside View

Summit Strategies' Turner believes that there's a reason Oracle Enterprise Manager is so effective within grid computing installations. "Oracle's strategy is to manage from the inside of the application—mapping deep knowledge of its core system components with real performance of end-user business services at the level of discrete business services," she says. "Oracle has a good perspective on what's going on with those business services and is gradually extending Oracle Enterprise Manager to encompass multiple layers of the infrastructure. Other system management tools have more of an 'outside-looking-in' perspective on the application and database environments."

In other words, as a vendor that supplies not only the database but also many mature enterprise applications and associated middleware, Oracle has an intimate view of the entire application stack. According to Dave Pearson, senior director of Oracle architecture, this unique insight into the infrastructure allows Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 2 to provide richer end-to-end application management for all application environments.

"Once you define services, either at the database or the application level, you can set policies that establish expected service levels, measure those service levels from an end-user perspective, rapidly isolate problematic issues through the entire stack, and respond by adjusting resources as appropriate," he explains.

Managing Change

While these new management capabilities represent a huge advancement for the industry, teaching and learning new procedures can be challenging in many corporate cultures. Still, customers who have used the browser-based interface in Oracle Enterprise Manager claim that it makes routine tasks and training easier and more efficient.

"Training DBAs is extremely easy with the Web interface of Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control," says Starwood's Nanda. "Rather than having to work with a dozen tools and learn their commands, you can do it all through a single interface."

Having a cohesive view of the IT environment becomes more important as customers adopt virtualized grids in which physical resources enable a logical set of IT services. Oracle Enterprise Manager treats IT resources as virtual components that can be transparently mapped onto business services, provisioned, monitored, and managed. "Graphical service topologies and service dashboards continually display pertinent information to both IT managers and business owners, so they can monitor application services and the quality of service being delivered to end users, rather than focusing only on the performance of discrete components," Oracle's Fardoost says.

Advance America's Toothman believes that approaching the management discipline at this level "ups the ante for administrators" and that their jobs become correspondingly more interesting.

"As more of our routine management tasks are automated by Oracle software, our IT staff is able to take on more-challenging tasks for the business," he says. "Oracle Enterprise Manager makes it easier to understand the grid environment through the topology viewer and other mappings."

Summit Strategies' Turner believes that the technology professionals who confront these management challenges will find more-interesting work. "Gradually we're going to see a need for higher-caliber IT professionals who can think at these higher levels of abstraction."

These changes in IT management approach are already happening as businesses migrate toward a more-automated IT environment. Replacements has discovered these productivity benefits firsthand in its work with Oracle Enterprise Manager. "We've transferred much of the administrative load off of our UNIX/Linux administrator," says Meredith. "Similarly, our DBA is doing a lot more high-level managing and a lot less mundane work. With Oracle Enterprise Manager, he can see all the databases and all the servers through one interface, so he knows at a glance if there is a resource bottleneck, such as if a server hits a memory or CPU threshold or end-user response time gets a little bit slow."

Turner sees this pattern repeatedly. "The journey toward management automation requires enterprises to plan and operate IT differently than they might have done in the past," she says.

"In an automated, policy-driven world, service-level agreements need to be defined in the context of end-to-end business processes rather than physical hardware characteristics, like percentage of uptime," she says. "Similarly, IT staff members need to rethink their roles and responsibilities as they move away from manual problem intervention and start focusing on automation through more-comprehensive management software such as Oracle Enterprise Manager."

But the successes reported here—and many others just like them—are motivating many companies to get started now.

Oracle Database 10g Just Got Better
By Kelli Wiseth

Oracle Database 10g Release 2 provides more flexibility, lowers costs, and delivers higher quality of service.

Two years ago, when Oracle introduced Oracle Database 10g, the first database for grid computing, the concept of enterprise grid computing was in its infancy. Today enterprise grid computing is maturing, evidenced by developments such as the 60-member (and counting) Enterprise Grid Alliance and its release of a reference model to guide enterprises in the adoption of grid computing, and Project MegaGrid, a group project of Dell, EMC, Intel, and Oracle created to develop a standard approach to building and deploying enterprise grids. Over the past two years, many of the benefits of enterprise grid computing, including better utilization of IT resources—which leads to greater flexibility, lower costs, and higher quality of service—have become the mantra of forward-thinking CEOs and CIOs.

With numerous new features in the areas of performance, scalability, reliability, and security, Oracle Database 10g Release 2 promises to help customers achieve these benefits and more. Plus, enhancements that continue to simplify and automate database management make it easier for IT staff to deliver a higher quality of service and lower their data-center costs.

"Release 2 solidifies Oracle Database's role as the foundation for an enterprise grid infrastructure, ensuring that IT resources are provisioned where needed, when needed," says Ken Jacobs, vice president of product strategy at Oracle. "In this release, Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) can manage storage for multiple databases within the grid, even when multiple versions of Oracle are used, to help ensure that storage management is cost-effective and flexible. Faster sorting (as much as five times faster) and enhancements in areas such as workload management, job scheduling, and system management deliver more-efficient resource utilization."

Oracle Database 10g Release 2 provides many benefits "not only for those focused strictly on grid computing but also for any organization interested in lowering costs, improving performance, and improving security," adds Jacobs. "With numerous high-profile breaches over the last year—3.9 million customer accounts lost in transit from one of the world's largest banks, and a staggering 40 million accounts stolen from a credit card processing agent this past summer—security is paramount to any organization today, large or small."

To ensure that unauthorized users cannot compromise sensitive user data, Oracle Database 10g Release 2 provides Transparent Data Encryption, which enables data to be easily and automatically encrypted on disk. "Allowing organizations to secure sensitive data centrally inside their database rather than through complex application programming interfaces is simply more cost-effective, since it saves development time. Plus, ensuring that sensitive user data remains confidential can bolster customer confidence, one of the measures of quality of service," says Jacobs.

Furthermore, many of the new or improved features of Oracle Database 10g Release 2 help lower infrastructure costs.

Oracle Database 10g Release 2 is "a useful extension of the technology with some solid new features that are going to improve time on task, opening up the possibility for cost savings," says David Scott, database practice manager at Atlanta, Georgia-based Intec Telecom Systems. Intec develops world-class operations and business-support systems used by more than 60 percent of the world's largest telecommunications carriers in more than 70 countries. The majority of Intec's nearly 700 implementations run on Oracle. Scott's role at Intec involves more than just keeping abreast of trends; he also evangelizes proper use and application of various technologies, including Oracle, for the product group to meet Intec customers' needs.

Scott is one of many beta testers who worked with Oracle Database 10g Release 2 during a beta-test week at Oracle headquarters last May (see "DBAs Discuss Oracle Database 10g Release 2," page 44). "I think Oracle Database 10g Release 2 will add additional benefits to Intec's offering, both from a technology and a business standpoint," offers Scott. There's a lot to like in the new release, he adds, noting the vastly improved installation experience for Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) with the Cluster Verification Utility and Oracle Clusterware—an improvement Scott says could have some significant impact in reducing costs for Intec.

In addition to lowering costs, leading companies today are trying to obtain flexibility and higher quality of service. For example, Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide is undergoing an IT transformation designed to meet these goals using Oracle Database 10g Release 2 for a key foundational element: the operational data store at the heart of their online transaction environment.

A Highly Available Solution

One of the largest hotel and leisure companies in the world, Starwood owns, leases, franchises, or manages 750 hotels in 80 countries, providing more than a quarter of a million rooms worldwide. To deliver the flexibility and availability required in a highly competitive business environment, Starwood is currently in the midst of a multiyear, multifaceted series of IT projects that includes retiring a mainframe, explains Tom Conophy, Starwood executive vice president and chief technology officer.

Starwood's application portfolio includes mainframe-based reservation and customer-loyalty (Starwood Preferred Guest) systems, as well as distribution systems, Web sites, call centers, content management, and marketing systems that run on Oracle. Conophy says Starwood is moving all of its mainframe-based applications to "an enterprisewide architecture that includes Web-centric end-user interfaces; service-oriented architecture [SOA] for business-logic exposure; and an operational data store as a foundational piece, with Oracle Database 10g at the heart of that."

Starwood's operational data store is currently running Oracle Database 10g and will be upgraded to Oracle Database 10g Release 2 on a three-node cluster with Oracle RAC. Oracle Database 10g Release 2 includes some important new performance and availability features, such as runtime load balancing across all nodes in the cluster, that will help ensure that Starwood meets its operational-service-level goals. "The overriding benefit we're seeking from Oracle Database 10g is high availability of our system," says Bill Camp, Starwood's vice president of enterprise system information. "We intend to take advantage of Oracle Database 10g Release 2 to reduce both planned and unplanned outages. We're looking for a very high-availability environment." Conophy adds that Starwood is targeting 99.999 percent availability for its Oracle-based operational data store. "We're building out this platform powered by Oracle Database 10g to drive the online engine that more and more of our guests are shifting to," says Conophy. "No matter how they get to the system—from our branded Web site, call center, travel agent, or third-party Web site—the system must be available."

Starwood is making a "significant investment in transforming its technology platform to support the enormous growth that we expect over the next few years, given hotel growth and the massive shift to online booking," says Conophy, noting that close to 10 percent of Starwood's revenue comes from its branded Web sites. He adds that Starwood is "building out a series of scalable engines that encompass core components that can be leveraged for existing and new systems—shopping engines, inventory engines, booking engines, loyalty engines."

The mainframe migration is just one of Starwood's IT projects involving Oracle. The company has several deployments of Oracle Database 10g that will be upgraded to Oracle Database 10g Release 2, including the content management system that feeds its external Web sites. One of the key reasons to upgrade that particular system to Oracle Database 10g Release 2 is to take advantage of the XQuery support in the new release—the first commercial database management system to support the W3C's XQuery language. The benefit? Greater flexibility for developers.

"XQuery support will be great for our content management system, since the content is stored in XML format," says Arup Nanda, Starwood's director of database engineering and operations. Support for XQuery in the database gives developers more choices. "The flexibility simply increases tremendously for the developer community," says Nanda. This native support for XQuery means that developers can query XML, relational, object-relational, and repository data using the industry-standard query language for querying XML.

Manage, Administer, and Develop with Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Download pdf

A Flexible, Manageable Foundation

Flexibility is also an important requirement for global communications leader Motorola, particularly for the underlying data model contained in Motorola's database. The company's Biometrics Solutions, a division of its Government and Enterprise Mobility Solutions (GEMS) unit, has provided automated fingerprint and palm-print identification systems, inkless live-scan stations, and mobile fingerprint capture solutions to government and enterprise customers around the world for more than three decades.

The latest generation of the Biometrics Solutions division's Printrak Biometric Identification Solution (BIS) is an integrated suite of applications that currently runs on Oracle Database 10g and is used by law enforcement, government, and civil agencies in more than 37 countries. All new installations of Printrak BIS will be deployed on Oracle Database 10g Release 2.

Printrak BIS relies on Oracle Text to handle indexing and processing of the massive amounts of data that flow through the system. Although Printrak BIS is sometimes referred to generically as an "automated fingerprint identification system," the system processes much more than fingerprints. For example, a typical Printrak BIS for law enforcement manages information related to criminal investigations, while for customers outside of law enforcement—school districts or casinos, for example, where job applicants may nonetheless be cross-checked against criminal databases as part of the employment screening process—the system holds data associated with applicants, rather than criminals. Besides fingerprint information related to a criminal investigation or a job application, a BIS system may also include palm prints, facial images, iris images, signatures, audio clips, or demographic information.

"Each customer requires a different schema for the demographic and case- or applicant-related information they store, so we use XML for maximum flexibility," says Aris Prassinos, distinguished member of technical staff for Motorola's Biometrics Solutions division. The typical Printrak BIS system stores several million rows containing XML data with several thousand rows added or updated each day. For example, one Printrak BIS system stores about 10 million rows of search XML data averaging 2 to 3K in length, with each row containing about 50 XML elements. Considering that a 1,000-ppi scan of a palm can comprise several megabytes, it's not surprising that the typical Motorola Printrak BIS database system is large—"anywhere from 1, 2, or 3 terabytes is quite common," says Prassinos.

Motorola's system relies heavily on all the automated management features of Oracle Database 10g, from automatic memory management to undo management and checkpoint tuning, says Prassinos. Many Printrak BIS customer sites don't have in-house resources to tune and manage the system after it's set up and running, he explains, so the automated management features of Oracle Database 10g "are enormously important to our customers, who rarely have the staff to support our systems."

Furthermore, "it's futile to spend a lot of time tuning up front, when in a matter of months the workload is completely different," says Prassinos. "With the automatic tuning and management features built into Oracle Database 10g, the system adjusts itself over time." Starwood's Nanda agrees, noting that with Oracle Database 10g Release 2, administration is "even simpler than before." Nanda adds that this makes the DBA's job "much easier, for novices and experts alike."

Conclusion

The growth of the Enterprise Grid Alliance and other initiatives such as Project MegaGrid is just one indication of how enterprise grid computing is maturing. However, the true test of maturity is measured in terms of customer success. According to Oracle's Jacobs, "Over the past 18 months, we've witnessed rapid adoption of Oracle Database 10g by our customers and partners, who've upgraded from prior releases or migrated their applications off legacy systems."

Forward-looking organizations such as Starwood, with Oracle at the core of its operational data store; Motorola, with Printrak BIS; and many more will derive even greater benefit from the unique features of Oracle Database 10g Release 2.

"Oracle Database 10g Release 2 continues to build on the key capabilities that were introduced with Oracle Database 10g to provide the flexible foundation required for enterprise grid computing," says Jacobs. "What matters most, of course, is that we continue to focus on customer requirements, helping customers meet their business and technical needs, providing greater flexibility, and delivering the highest quality of service at the lowest possible cost of ownership."

Starwood prepares a warm global welcome for guests with SAP and IBM. ... e-business solutions by IBM and SAP

	Starwood prepares a warm global welcome for guests with SAP and IBM. ... e-business solutions by IBM and SAP
	Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, Inc, implemented SAP R/3 on IBM eServer iSeries with IBM DB2 Universal Database. Published date: 25 Jun 2004

• The Challenge

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