Priceline.com wins big with automated server management

Feature
Sep 25, 20062 mins

Taking off with automated server management.

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

NETWORK MANAGEMENT ALL-STARS

BNSF Railway | Evolution Benefits | PHH Mortgage | Priceline.com | Wilson & Company, Engineers and Architects

Network Management

Enterprise All-Stars

Guide to the ’06 All-Stars
Winners alphabetical listing

WINNERS BY TECHNOLOGY

Applications | LANs & Routers | Network Management | OS, Servers & Data Center | Security | Storage | WAN, VoIP & Convergence | Wireless & Mobility

WINNERS BY INDUSTRY

Construction | Education | Financial Services | Government | Healthcare | Manufacturing | Media | Retail | Travel/Transportation | Utilities
Vendors to the All-Stars

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