Customer Overview
Established in 1972 as a ticketing agency, PST Travel Services Sdn Bhd (formerly known as Peter Stuyvesant Travel Services Sdn Bhd), is fully owned by Wawasan TKH Sdn Bhd.
In 1995, PST opened two branches in Penang and Subang, hoping to meet the demands of the rapidly growing travel business. Today, PST is one of the Top 3 travel agencies in Malaysia, with over 180 highly trained employees. PST’s services go well beyond reservation and ticketing, extending into hotel reservation and car rental as well as conference, seminar, and incentive arrangements.
Combining global coverage with local service, PST offers an integrated technology infrastructure that provides intelligent analysis of travel data, allowing corporations to maximize the return on their travel investment. For travelers, PST offers consistent service and a broad range of resources to help them stay satisfied, productive, and focused on their business objectives.
Challenges
Legacy IT Infrastructures
Their existing legacy servers had been in use for over 5 years and were performing poorly, unable to handle large volumes of concurrent access. Fully occupied HDD and RAM slots severely limited scalability. Replacing the HDD and RAM was not advisable due to slow server processors and the possibility that data migration could cause a crash, resulting in a significant loss of data. Using the “teaming” (i.e. LACP) method to increase throughput for the network occupies a large number of cables.
Lack of Efficiency
Many applications (SQL, House Application, Remote Desktop, Web Server) were in constant use while branches were simultaneously accessing the server, resulting in a performance bottleneck. IT administrators were forced to purchase a temporary high-end computer to host any new application(s) created, based on business needs.
No Disaster Recovery / Single Point of Failure
The physical servers were all standalone and without any backup capabilities, severely impacting business if the physical server was down. With no data recovery and restoration capabilities, a disaster or malware attack would have a severe or crippling impact on business.
Sangfor Solution
Sangfor consolidated all outdated servers into only 4 hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) appliances to support all IT applications.
Solution Values
Replaced with Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI)
- HCI technology consolidates all legacy IT infrastructures (compute, storage, network, and security) into one, providing high-performance information access, both locally and remotely from branches.
- Hyper-converged infrastructure is highly expandable with no need to add on additional physical servers (provided there are sufficient resources to provision virtual machines). Sangfor HCI enabled PST Travel to easily add resources (RAM, storage) without powering off the physical server.
High Efficiency
With the high expandability of HCI, PST Travel needs no additional resources to host new and vital applications. IT admins were able to provision 2 or more virtual machines to load balance resources to core business applications.
Business Continuity
- Critical applications are now elastic with Sangfor DRS & DRX. HCI can automatically adjust system resources to cope with peak business hours.
- High Availability mode is one of the many native security features of Sangfor HCI, creating multiple copies of all data.
- Sangfor HCI ensures that PST experiences no downtime and no business impact, even in the event of a disaster.
