Amadeus technology

4.2 Data Centre

At Amadeus we are committed to building, growing and nurturing partnerships with our customers and the data centre in Erding, Germany is no exception. More than 400 airlines and 91,000 travel agencies depend on the systems hosted and maintained at the data centre facility to deliver over 3.7 million net bookings per day. The facility also hosts and manages the passenger service and departure control systems for more than 100 airlines.

The Amadeus Data Centre is one of the largest data processing centres dedicated to the travel industry. Amadeus' solutions are offered in a SaaS (Software as a Service) model hosted on primarily open systems and highly scalable hardware on more than 5,000 servers at the facility in Erding.

The data centre in numbers

• More than one billion transaction per day or 17,000 transaction per second at peak times with an average system response time of less than 0.3 seconds.
• Over 5,000,000 database accesses per second.
• Nine petabytes of storage on over 5,000 servers.
• More than 3,000 IT changes and approximately 400 application software loads each month while maintaining an average uptime of 99.99%.
• Around 200,000 hardware system components and more than 400,000 logical system components are maintained in our configuration management database.
• Seven diesel generators with twelve cylinders at 1,400kW and two generators with eight cylinders at 1,100kW with 130,000 litres of diesel in underground tanks.

Amadeus relies on the skills of its operations teams based around the globe to consistently provide reliable processing power and service excellence 24 hours every day.

The building and its physical security

The bunker-like building has metre thick, steel reinforced concrete walls and ceilings. It's shaped like a pentagon with 6,000 square metres of raised floor. A fence, monitored with perimeter radar and cameras, surrounds the premises and a trench prevents possible attacks using vehicles. Infrared observation and cameras are installed for surveillance. Rooms are equipped with fire alarms, advance smoke detection systems, CO₂ extinguishing systems and sprinklers.

The internal configuration of the data centre is designed to further increase the resilience of the service in case of failure of any single component. The principle of n+1 and no single point of failure is applied to all functions at all levels.

In 2011 Amadeus saw the construction of an energy annex to meet the ever increasing processing power requirements. The annex will become operational in early 2012 and grow the uninterruptible power supply (UPS) power production by nearly 40% and cooling production by more than 50%.