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| SGI enterprise-class server and storage solutions are driving a non-stop Oracle order processing and reservation management system handling 40,000 Paris taxi fares daily.
With more than 30 million visitors descending on Paris streets every year, the City of Light relies on its taxis to get people where they need to go. To ensure it can meet that demand, the city's leading taxi company relies on an enterprise-class compute and storage solution from SGI. Les Taxis Bleus has moved its Oracle software-based order processing and reservation management system to an SGI® Altix® XE server and SGI® InfiniteStorage solution to guarantee a fast, reliable service to taxi customers 24 hours a day. The company serves as a booking centre for more than 3,000 independent cab drivers throughout the Paris region. "On any given day, we'll take 40,000 calls from customers in need of taxis," said Patrick Del'Vecchio, director, IT systems, Les Taxis Bleus. "We needed a system that shortens wait times for customers and works non-stop, day and night. With this SGI solution running our Oracle database and transaction processing system, we're always ready for the daily onslaught of call and transaction traffic." A staff of 120 call centre agents take telephone cab requests and enter them into a reservation system. A radio link then automatically dispatches the order by interactively communicating with drivers via a device located inside each cab. An on-board electronic payment terminal sends the customer's credit card information back to the server to complete the transaction. The SGI and Oracle solution also drives Les Taxis Bleus' internal accounting system. To ensure 100% availability, the company maintains fully redundant server and storage systems. Transaction processing and radio communications are administered via a four-core SGI® Altix® XE240 server equipped with 8GB of memory and running Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® v.4. |
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| SGI, Altix and Oracle | |
SGI's enterprise solutions process and manage large amounts of data faster and more affordably than any solution in their class - including offerings from IBM, HP and Sun. Based on real-world customer results, SGI Altix systems have been shown to run Oracle databases up to five times faster than IBM pSeries servers. "With its heritage in high-performance computing, SGI is delivering server and storage solutions that are powerhouses for enterprise Oracle environments where failure is not an option," said Ken Won, director, enterprise data management, SGI. "More companies than ever are seeing how SGI's enterprise solutions offer the lowest total cost of ownership of any solution in their class, commanding as little as one-quarter the price, half the floor space, and one-quarter the power of competing server and storage systems." |
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| The system taps an Oracle 10g database and 1TB of SGI InfiniteStorage 220 direct-attached Fibre Channel storage, which neutralises infrastructure bottlenecks that might otherwise impact service delivery and customer satisfaction. The entire configuration is repeated in a replicated configuration that backs up the primary system.
SGI installed the system in May 2007 with assistance from Aenix, a major French systems integrator. An SGI customer for several years, Les Taxis Bleus decided to move to the Altix XE platform to take advantage of the latest multi-core Intel® Xeon® processors. The company also wanted to leverage the scalability and reliability of the Altix and InfiniteStorage platforms to rapidly and efficiently handle transaction volumes as they grow. "It was absolutely essential for Les Taxis Bleus to look to the future when investing in our enterprise IT infrastructure, and this was a key reason for choosing the SGI solution," added Del'Vecchio. "Not only will this new solution allow us to cut transaction times for our current base of 12 million customers annually, but we have the headroom to handle significantly more - without any degradation in service quality. For us, this is a mission critical solution, and SGI has understood that from the beginning."FURTHER INFORMATION |
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