This comes as little surprise since Tru64 Unix is not being supported on HP’s Itanium-based Integrity line and the TruCluster extensions that were supposed to be available in HP’s HP-UX Unix variant were mothballed and replaced with file systems and clustering software that is a hybrid of HP’s own MC ServiceGard and Veritas software.
Once Dollar Thrifty had to look at moving to a different HP platform entirely with Veritas software, it might has well have looked at all the options in the Linux market, and executives at the car rental firm did just that. None of this is the interesting bit. What is interesting is that way back when, as Dollar Thrifty created its reservation system, it did so in the Oracle database using Oracle tools.
What that meant is this: Dollar Thifty made the decision to move in the first quarter, and after putting out RFPs and doing the vendor dance, the company could pick a vendor – IBM – and a new platform – IBM’s pSeries p5 570 midrange AIX servers running AIX 5.3 and the Oracle 10g database – and then do the entire migration of its reservation system in a mere three months. Multiple p5 570s are clustered for high availability using IBM’s HACMP V5.3 clustering software, which will be generally available on August 12.
Karl Freund, vice president of pSeries product marketing at IBM, says that Big Blue has an easy time convincing customers it has competitive Unix boxes, but it has a hard time convincing customers that such migrations are not even possible, but doable on a regular basis. But, of course, you can’t be tied tightly to the operating system or the underlying iron to do that.
Dollar Thrifty Group, which runs the Dollar Rent A Car and Thrifty Car Rental chains, is based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is just a stone’s throw away from the Migration Factory that IBM has set up in its Austin, Texas facility to make such migrations easier. Those migration services were a key part of this deal, which brings IBM the sale of several p5 570 systems and related storage, but equally importantly, denies HP a sale of one of its Integrity servers to an old Compaq customer.
