Club Med Case StudyDownload
Club Med invented the concept of vacation clubs. With revenues of 1.6 billion euros, it is the worldwide leader in the "all-inclusive" vacation. Club Med operates in 40 countries with 80 Villages and the Club Med 2 cruise ship.
Looking For
A Network Monitoring Solution
Club Med's new international MPLS network was designed to ensure interconnectivity of all the company's sites and subsidiaries with the central resources hosted in the Paris region (where the headquarters and data center are located). In order to deploy and manage this network, Club Med looked for a solution that would:
- Ensure management and control of the MPLS infrastructure.
- Provide real-time information on network usage and performance.
- Allow monitoring of the overall application flow for bandwidth management purposes.
- Enable IT staff to plan and securely execute the roll out of critical business applications worldwide.
"After a rigorous selection and evaluation process, we chose the [ACE Live] solution," says Technical Director StZphane Kersulec. "We deployed four appliances at our main locations in Asia, North America and the Paris region, as well as an [ACE Live Director] data aggregation appliance at headquarters."
Stéphane summarizes the reasons for the choice as follows:
- Simple to learn and use.
- Efficient, powerful data mining.
- Easy drag-and-drop editing of graphics.
- Up-to-the-minute data granularity for more than 60 important metrics that are collected automatically.
- The ability to aggregate data from globally-distributed appliances into an integrated overview using the same interface as the appliances themselves.
Xavier Albira, who was the engineer in charge of the project, highlights the following benefits:
Ease of Deployment
"The appliances were delivered to the remote site and, instead of flying an engineer out from headquarters, the local managers were able to install the appliances themselves because they were so easy to configure, which was a great savings in terms of time and money. At our Paris sites, the appliances were installed quickly and without any problems. Overall, the solution's implementation phase took less than a week worldwide!"
Quick Answers to Questions
"The [ACE Live] solution is designed to process large quantities of data. This enables us to respond to the user complaints as quickly as our business demands.
The aggregation appliance enables us to focus on a remote site's data without worrying about which path the traffic traveled—we don't need to worry about having probes in the right place at the right time. For example, the data flow at a village in Asia can simultaneously target several central sites. The [ACE Live Director] appliance gives us a complete, global perspective as easily as if the traffic flowed through a single appliance.
In the course of our operations, we need only a few minutes to find the necessary information. All we have to do is select the Business Group of the site in question, choose the time slot and the evaluation criteria, and then it's easy to drill down through the data to find the data we need.
The metrics given for monitoring application performance allow us to quickly identify the cause of problems and clear the network of blame when it's not at fault."
Xavier, who is experienced in network evaluation at Club Med, continues:
The Solution's Strengths
"The most convincing points during the evaluation were how relevant the measurements were to our problem-solving needs, and the consistently quick response of the [ACE Live] interface to data queries when drilling down to find the source of a problem. I was also impressed by how easy it was to use the [ACE Live Director]: it delivers a view of the global network that looks exactly like any of the local devices."
"The most convincing points during the evaluation were how relevant [ACE Live's] measurements were to our problem-solving needs, and the consistently quick response of the interface to data queries when drilling down to find the source of a problem. I was also impressed by how easy it was to use the [ACE Live Director] data aggregation appliance: it delivers a view of the global network that looks exactly like any of the local devices.”
Xavier Albira
Network Engineer
Club Med