SYSTEMS

Sun Microsystems announced that it has been selected by Thomas Cook, one of the UK's largest travel companies, to provide a complete data back-up, storage and recovery solution. Sun will supply Thomas Cook with enterprise backup and storage software, to provide a stable platform to support the expansion of its entire UK business. Sun was selected for the company wide platform refresh after an assessment revealed it could be at risk of data loss due to single points of failure. The new platform, delivered in partnership with SAP and Symantec, will see Thomas Cook investing over $1million in a range of products and services from Sun. The entire refresh will provide wide-reaching benefits across the business, and improve compliance and governance systems. Thomas Cook will have a flexible archiving framework to enable the discovery of content held within email, file system and collaborative environments, whilst benefiting from reduced storage costs and simplified management. Sun will manage the migration and deployment to the new system, followed by the redeployment of Thomas Cook's site back-up architecture with a split-site disaster recovery solution. The deal includes Sun Fire V440 servers for the SAP application migration and hardware refresh, Sun StorEdge 6920 systems to replace the existing enterprise storage and enterprise back-up and restore solution, Sun StorEdge L500 tape library. "This entire product refresh across the Thomas Cook group has provided us with a robust and reliable network supporting our 6,000 strong UK workforce, including back-office workers and our retail operations," said Adrian Berry, Infrastructure Manager, Thomas Cook UK and Ireland. "With around 4.8 million customer transactions each month it is imperative for us to have an infrastructure which can support all our existing and future operations. Sun and its partners have delivered to meet all of our requirements, within agreed timescales and to meet our budgets." "The selection of Sun Microsystems for this project will see Thomas Cook running a streamlined and highly profitable infrastructure equipped to deal with the high-level of transactions required from a leading travel company," said Trudy Norris-Grey, President and Managing Director, Sun Microsystems UK and Ireland.