Company: Travelport GDS, Atlanta, GA
Company Description: Travelport GDS is one of the world’s largest global distribution system (GDS) providers operating both the Galileo and the Worldspan brands, providing real-time travel information and booking capabilities to online and offline travel agencies in over 145 countries. Travelport GDS is a division of Travelport, one of the world’s largest service providers to the travel industry.
Nomination Category: Information Technology Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Information Technology Team of the Year

Nomination Title: Travelport's Data Center Migration Team

Tell the story about what this nominated team achieved since January 1 2008 (up to 500 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

Over the last several years, Travelport has invested $450m in technology
refreshes and another $50m for state of the art equipment in its Atlanta,
Georgia data center complex. As a result, the new, modern facility has an
extensible infrastructure and set the stage for the Technical Operations
team’s highest priority project of the year – migrate two data centers into
one.

In early in 2008, the Technical Operations team initiated a phased migration
plan to combine Travelport’s Denver, Colorado operations – which supports the
Galileo/Apollo global distribution systems (GDS) – into the Atlanta facility –
which supports the Worldspan GDS. 

Overseen by Chief Technical Officer David Lauderdale and Vice President Tim
Dolezal, the massive consolidation operation required months of planning, the
efforts of 675 employees and coordination across three company divisions. A
phased approach was identified to mitigate risk and minimize service
interruption to the thousands of Travelport customers worldwide. The team
engaged crucial stakeholders including United Airlines and the company’s
larger travel agency customers. They created detailed checklists and thousands
of lines of scripted code to conduct and track the process of moving the
extensive applications to the Atlanta facility. The plan targeted integration
of 600 servers, the migration of over 60,000 network routes, 45 million
passenger reservations and approximately 1 petabyte of data. It also included
risk scenarios, crisis planning and key internal and external messaging.

The scope of coordination by this Technical Operations team was, by far, the
most challenging obstacle. Dolezal led the team through practice migrations
each weekend in June, conducted customer testing in July, and orchestrated
four full dress rehearsals involving other divisions and customers in
September. On the last weekend in September this highly experienced staff
synchronized systems, redirected network connections and successfully migrated
applications and data in the first critical phase of the consolidation. The
operation engaged hundreds of co-workers across 36 countries and used more
than 250,000 conference bridge minutes, tens of thousands of instant messages
and thousands of e-mails.  Of the 45 minutes downtime planned, the team had
Atlanta’s core system receiving traffic in less than 20 minutes.

Results of the data center migration’s first phase have exceeded expectations.
Applications and utilities are running faster and customers report a 50
percent improvement in system response time for key applications.  The
combined complex in Atlanta, running the three GDSs as well as the host
reservation systems of several major airlines, now handles a peak message rate
of more than 20,000 messages per second and over 1 billion messages per day.

For Travelport, this extensive migration not only delivers significant
infrastructure upgrades to its system and network technologies, but provides
major cost savings from synergies, reduces the physical footprint and improves
reliability of the company’s global operating systems. In addition, Travelport
customers enjoy the advantages of the technology, products and services
delivered through a world class data center facility.  The Technical
Operations team is currently engaged in the consolidation’s next phase –
migrating less-visible network and distributed platform applications – with
full cut-over anticipated by first quarter 2009.

List hyperlinks to any online news stories, press releases, or other documents that support the claims made in the section above. IMPORTANT: Begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, [http://www.youraddress.com]:

http://www.travelport.com/media_center/news_releases/press_releases/2008/07-01-RelocateNAmericanCorpHDQAndPrimaryDataCenter.aspx

http://www.travelport.com/media_center/news_releases/press_releases/2008/20-10-AchievesKeyMilestoneinConsolidation.aspx

Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the nominated team:

David Lauderdale is Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Travelport GDS, heading
the global CTO function for the combined businesses of the Galileo and
Worldspan GDSs, as well as the IT Services & Software and Business
Intelligence groups.

Previously, as CTO and senior vice president - Worldwide Technical Operations
for Worldspan, Lauderdale was responsible for the company’s worldwide data
center operations; communications network planning and engineering; e-commerce
infrastructure engineering; and large server computer systems software,
storage and infrastructure planning and management. Lauderdale was the key
leader in Worldspan’s aggressive adoption of standards-based infrastructure,
hybrid architecture, and the seamless integration of open systems and
mainframes.