Bandwidth hungry
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Hard Rock Cafe’s centralised infrastructure supports widely distributed sites.
The Hard Rock Cafe venues are best known for music memorabilia, glitz and ‘good ol’ American cooking’. But behind the flashy exterior, a sophisticated technology infrastructure helps keep operations running smoothly.
Its chain of 130 cafes, hotels and casinos situated in 41 countries is backed up by state of the art technology, including audio and video systems, business intelligence and financial systems, all based at its Orlando offices. To support this highly centralised infrastructure, the company places a huge reliance on a fast and perpetually available network.
HRC has recently implemented a new wide area network (WAN) from IT infrastructure vendor Savvis for its 65 wholly-owned sites around the world (other sites are run as franchises).
The fact that HRC is in the hospitality business, not the network provision business, affected its strategic thinking, says Kelly Maddern, HRC’s senior director of IT: “We wanted to leverage Savvis’s knowledge and let them do the dirty work.”
“The most challenging part was ensuring no downtime. Disconnecting one service and turning on another leaves a very small window of opportunity."
Kelly Maddern, senior director of IT, Hard Rock Cafe
A six-week implementation entailed laying down a mixed network of private dedicated connections and digital subscriber lines (DSLs) depending on the individual requirements of the site. “We went through it site by site rather than geographically,” explains Maddern. “Even in the US there are some areas where private networks are not as cost effective as DSL.”
Both HRC’s staff and customers are now benefiting from the increased bandwidth. “The most challenging part was ensuring no downtime,” says Maddern. “Disconnecting one service and turning on another leaves a very small window of opportunity but it was flawlessly executed. The only change the staff have noticed is that everything works faster now.”
A further consideration, apart from speed, is scalability. Not only does HRC have to cater for technology which will demand ever more bandwidth, but there is also potential for the franchised cafes to be upgraded to the Savvis network.
Further reading in Information Age
From the Information Age Future of the Data Centre Conference 2005: The Cost Killer
