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Photos: Amadeus' European data centre

Inside the facility powering most of the world's airlines.

on Jul 31 2012 7:29AM

Welcome to the largest civil data centre in Europe. From this facility, located close to Munich in the south of Germany, Amadeus runs an IT system that powers an overwhelming share of the transactions made by travel agents, airlines, cruise ship companies, rail operators — and increasingly by travelers themselves.

The taller rectangular building in this shot is Amadeus offices, the wider, angular building contains the six fire cells (server rooms) and related plant of the data centre. The facility is located within a convenient distance to fibre networks serving a major European hub (Munich) in an area relatively free of flood and earthquake activity. But the choice of location owes more to the efforts of a local politician to win business in the area after Amadeus’ three largest founding shareholders – Lufthansa, Air France and Iberia – divvied up its operations among them. Amadeus’ corporate headquarters are in Madrid, Spain (500 staff), its software development in the south of France (2500 staff), and its operations run from here in Germany.

Amadeus describes the facility as being three data centres within one 25,000 square metre building. Each of these three data centres contains two “fire cells” (i.e. server rooms) served by one “technical cell” (i.e. plant room with UPS, cooling equipment, diesel generators et al). Each technical cell (serving two server rooms) has enough UPS capacity for 3000 KW of power, which is 10x greater than what the facility was originally built with in 1990. The total facility is connected to two power substations capable of delivering up to 12 MW.

The building also contains Amadeus’ central operations centre, which monitors the health of the applications and services the company offers to travel industry customers, plus a security control room and a data centre operations control room. Curiously, staff from the operations centre, from facilities management and from the IT (hardware) sides of the business enter the facility from separate adjacent tunnels to ensure they can only enter the area of their immediate concern. Getting through to any part of the facility usually involves badge readers, pin codes and mantraps. Kinda looks like the set of Get Smart!

The various hardware, network and storage components within the Amadeus data centre combine to form one system that manages a staggering number of the world’s travel bookings. Whether you’re booking with a travel agent, directly with an airline or using a third party web site like Expedia or Opodo, you’re probably making one of the 500,000+ database calls per second that arrive at this facility. In 2011, the Amadeus data centre handled 948 million billed transactions. At its peak, that comes out at over a billion queries or 3.7 million bookings per day. This facility also powers many of the software transactions happening behind the scenes at airlines - systems such as departure control, boarding of customers onto planes, flight management data for the gate, inventory management, reservations and e-commerce. And more recently Amadeus has expanded into bookings for rail, hotels, cruise holidays and other travel products.

The hardware within the Amadeus data centre is connected with a staggering 7000 km of fibre optic cables. There are multiple 2.5 GB connections coming in and out of the facility via physically separate paths. Amadeus also provides a “Private G-WAN” service (an IP MPLS network) for customers such as Qantas. Amadeus buys and manages dedicated, fixed bandwidth from its carrier partners, delivered all the way to the airline’s facilities by Amadeus to guarantee quality of service.

Redundancy is built-in to the six server-room design, but no two cells are alike. The equipment required for any given Amadeus service tends to be distributed between various cells, and customers are clustered into groups between different fire cells to ensure an incident isolated to one area can only impact a limited number of customers.

On the tour we saw a mix of IBM, Sun and HP servers, lots of Cisco switching and storage from both IBM and EMC. But what caught the eye were the mainframes. These traditionally made up the core of Amadeus’ reservations system. Amadeus run four IBM mainframes in production with a fifth for testing. Technicians were in the process of upgrading from the last generation (z9’s) to the latest z10’s during our tour. But we’re told that this is probably the last generation Amadeus will invest in. With every release of new functionality, more and more of Amadeus' computing is being executed on open platforms. The greater share of Amadeus’ availability, DCS and inventory systems are already running on x86.

And this is what the mainframes are gradually being replaced with. Whilst there are plenty of x86 rack servers in operation, these blades are the latest weapon of choice. They do however, present some unique challenges around density – the blades in this enclosure aren’t cooled by the air conditioning piped from under the fake floor – they have their own dedicated cooling mechanism built into the rack that requires a separate water source and a compressor to feed.

The data centre, being 25 years old, was built to specifications that assumed a low price for power. It also assumed that machines could not safely operate beyond temperatures in the low 20’s. Today ASHRAE advises that IT equipment can operate in temperatures of up to 27 degrees. Amadeus would like to run its machines warmer and thus save on power costs, but its legacy makes that difficult. Amadeus' original mainframes required a whopping 50 square metres (versus 10 square metres today). As newer, smaller models replaced them, Amadeus began storing equipment from the back of the room forward, but not in a configuration that fit the cold aisle/hot aisle configurations that became the power-saving standard a decade later. Some older machines are facing 180 degrees in the wrong direction. Moving those live operational machines today would require downtime the company cannot afford. Staff have come up with a number of stop-gap innovations in the meantime, which you'll see in the next few slides.

Those areas of the data centre where a cold/hot aisle configuration isn’t possible create a “climatic short circuit” with hot air from one piece of equipment getting into a cold air area. This has been alleviated by a series of simple moveable white walls that separate warm and cool air. Every degree Amadeus can raise the temperature in a given firecell saves around 10,000 euros per annum.

Cool air is pumped into the data centre via a double floor 80cm above real ground. A lot of equipment also requires cabling that also enters the machine up through the floor. In the past, Amadeus would ask its suppliers to drill small holes in the floor tiles for these cables. But this created two problems – one was a loss of precious cool air being pumped up from under the fake floor. The other was that the holes could weaken the tiles. When new machines were rolled over floor tiles, there was a risk that some – weighing in excess of a tonne – could fall through the fake floor. Amadeus has since invented a ‘Tetris system’ of metal lids that – combined with brushes - block the cold air from escaping and can withstand extreme weight - but can still let cables through. This allows Amadeus to run its fans in a more efficient range – saving around 40,000 euros on power each year.

The walls of the data centre are one metre thick, with T90 certified doors (able to stand fires of up to 1000 degrees for up to 90 minutes before collapse). The building was also designed to absorb blasts. Here you can see the grid navigation that once enabled technicians to identify which machine to service – in the days of the mainframe, all the boxes looked the same. Today the grid system corresponds with the size of the floor tiles and is still used to guide service technicians.

We’re now in a service corridor between a fire cell and a technical cell. Inside the firecell, the fire retardant of choice is C02 – a gas fatally toxic to humans – another reason Amadeus is incredibly strict on access processes. The cables that fall outside the C02 protected area, meanwhile, are covered in a white paste that prevents them igniting should they come into contact with a spark.

Welcome inside one of Amadeus’ three ‘technical cells’. You’re looking at one series of cooling machines. Amadeus runs its plant at N+1 redundancy – always having one spare piece of equipment for every two operational. These cooling machines take warm water from the facility, cool it and return it back to the fire cells. Amadeus also runs indirect free cooling for around 200 days a year. On those days when the ambient outside air is below 12 degrees (and without too much humidity), warm air from the fire cells is sent to the roof, dispersed into a greater surface area as mist, cooled by the outside air and returned to the fire cell without the need to turn chillers on.

Closer to the fire cells, Amadeus runs “sensible” coolers that automatically react to temperature changes within the server room. Out of shot, Amadeus’ UPS footprint also allows for N+1, with a spare on hand if there is a problem with one of the primary devices. Every piece of IT equipment is also connected via two PDUs (power distribution units), and the fire cells are served by two separate power rails. There is enough battery power on hand to run the facility for 20-25 minutes to allow time for the diesel generators to spin up.

Amadeus runs a total of 12 diesel generators – each being a 12-cylinder ship diesel attached to a generator that can create 1.2MW of power. Two of these set-ups alone could thus run the whole data centre if required. The diesels take 8-10 seconds to spin up and Amadeus keeps 200,000 litres of diesel in ground tanks at any one time, enough for three days operation. These tanks can be refilled while the generators are operating.

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Amadeus invests in uptime

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