Priceline.com wins big with automated server management

Network management - more All-Stars: Priceline.com.

Network Management Enterprise All-Stars

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With $2.2 billion in gross travel bookings for 2005, Priceline.com handles millions of page views and tens of thousands of customer purchases each day.

To support this activity, Priceline.com has set up two load-balanced production infrastructures, passing traffic among thousands of Web and database servers at three physical sites.

The company is well recognized for its site uptime, because of its use of BladeLogic's BladeLogic Operations Manager server-management software suite, says Ron Rose, CIO at the Norwalk, Conn., travel giant. The software automates server provisioning, updating, patching and troubleshooting.

Among benefits, Rose reports rolling back changes across the server infrastructure in 10 minutes and a 60% reduction in administrative work related to configuration. Priceline.com continues to find new uses for the technology, especially within acquired companies, he adds.

"We are inclined to do rolling upgrades to make sure our Web site continues to improve but in a way that never costs us downtime."

- Ron Rose, CIO, Priceline.com