BEST DEPLOYMENT: WHO MADE MY TRIP?

THE CLIENT

Founded in 2000, MakeMyTrip.com is one
of India's leading online travel companies. After consolidating its
position in the market as a recognized brand, MakeMyTrip followed its
success in the US by launching its India operations in 2005. Rapidly,
MakeMyTrip became the preferred choice of millions of travelers who
were delighted to be empowered by few mouse clicks. Remaining
reliable, efficient and at the forefront of technology, the company's
commitment and customer-centricity allows it to better understand its
customers' diverse needs and wants, and deliver consistently. With
dedicated 24x7 customer support and offices in more than 20 cities
across India and presence in international locations, it has evolved
as one of the most trusted travel brands with cutting edge technology
advances and upgradations.

NEED FOR A SOLUTION

MakeMyTrip.com was growing through
transformation in tandem with fierce market competition. Being a
technology-backed website, the company was scaling rapidly in terms
of the number of hits and consistent need for greater uptime. The
website, running on Microsoft platform and was looking for
scalability. Therefore, the travel services major decided for a
complete overhaul of its website, and started to shift to open-source
technologies to add scalability and usability. For this, the company
required servers that could take up IT challenges, keeping the future
in mind.

SOLUTION PROVIDER : MICRO CLINIC

Delhi-based Micro Clinic is one of the
leading solution providers and system integration companies in India.
It offers an array of solutions around infrastructure management,
storage and security, as well as voice, data and video to a number of
clients in the enterprise and government sectors, besides others.
Micro Clinic offers technology implementation around servers,
routers, switches, firewalls and cabling infrastructure.

THE SOLUTION

For Micro Clinic, MakeMyTrip was not
just another customer. Implementation at country's leading e-commerce
website that attracts heavy web traffic was quite challenging, though
it was aware of the development work that was being carried out at
the customer's end. The company could have delivered the regular
order for rack servers within a few days.

“MakeMyTrip.com was a loyal customer
and our technical team was well aware of their future IT roadmap.
Hence we, suggested a blade center solution,” said Tarun Seth, MD,
Micro Clinic India. The company suggested HP blade solution, but the
management at MakeMyTrip.com closely looked at other vendors to draw
product comparisons, apart from price factor.

For almost a month, there were a series
of technical meetings, discussions and deliberations between the
customer and the teams of HP and Micro Clinic. Certified
professionals were assigned for site analysis, blade designing,
connectivity to network, and other technical specifications by HP and
Micro Clinic teams. Rajesh Dalal, Assistant VP-Technology,
MakeMyTrip.com said that, the data explosion versus quick uptime or
scalability factor was an important issue, and they had to be sure of
a futuristic solution to handle the surge in Internet traffic. “It
was a challenge of sorts to adjust to the new technology wherein
Micro Clinic and HP went an extra mile to convince the long-term
benefits of the blade architecture,” Dalal said.

“MakeMyTrip.com team monitored
closely the solution offered by HP and Micro Clinic. Since, blade was
the new technology for their IT infrastructure; the company carefully
observed the technology and market trends around implementation. We
selected the best solution as we have a keen eye on new vendors and
solutions in the market,” said Dalal.

According to Seth, when a customer does
a competitive analysis, one always pitches new features of a product
that the competitor does not have. “Finally HP made way into one of
the country's largest e-commerce companies. This choice was based
purely on technology,” Dalal admitted. He pointed out the fact that
normally other vendors do not provide hot plug hard drives, which HP
offered. In addition, according to him, the redundancy built on HP
was apparently better. According to Dalal, half-height blades of HP
with double density and half-rack space was another differentiator.
The HP servers at the customer end were supplied and serviced by
Micro Clinic. With a large set of blade centers, after-sales support
and servicing were some of the key differentiators of HP's offering,
besides pricing.

THE RESULT

Now, MakeMyTrip.com delivers an uptime
of 99.99 percent and is highly capable of handling up to 1.5 lakh
hits per day. Blade servers need lower costs and deliver more
performance; therefore IT managers see it as a facilitator for more
computing power. With high uptime and exceptionally good performance,
the company's IT team also decided to deploy HP blade center solution
across their datacenters at VSNL, Delhi and Netmagic, Mumbai.

Project
driven by: Avishek Rakshit