The growth of the Jumeirah Group has been reflective of that of its home city of Dubai; fast, energetic, and confident. The company now has hotels in London, New York, Shanghai, and the Maldives, in addition to some of the most famous hotels in Dubai, including the Madinat Jumeirah, Jumeirah Emirates Towers, and the iconic Burj Al Arab.

However, that rapid growth proved to be a mixed blessing for the hospitality group. While the business managed to grow rapidly, opening up new hotels and expanding into new territories, the company’s IT infrastructure was rapidly approaching its capacity.

At the time, the group was using distributed datacentres. However, while the strategy had served it well during its initial growth stage, the issues that come with infrastructure of that type had began to reach a point where they would soon start showing. The beginning of 2011 was the date the company believed its IT infrastructure would reach such a point.

As such, the company set out to devise a new strategy that would define how its IT infrastructure would be structured going into the future. “The objective was clear,” begins Jumeirah Group’s group director of information technology, infrastructure, and IT operations, David Teklit.

“The aim was to transform the IT infrastructure, addressing such issues as building internal clouds, virtualisation and automation, storage and information lifecycle management, datacentre networking, high availability, datacentre consolidation, energy efficiency, and business continuity and disaster planning,” he continues.

The main issue for the Jumeirah Group was that the previous best practice for IT infrastructures had been too rigid, which was why it was hitting a wall with its then infrastructure. The best solution in the eyes of Teklit and Jumeirah Group was a cloud-based IT infrastructure, rather than the traditional method of siloed solutions and building up its infrastructure when it was running out of capacity.

The first step for Jumeirah’s board was for Teklit and the other senior members of the IT group to get together and come up with a new strategy for tackling how the company would implement a cloud-based infrastructure. “We had to customise a datacentre strategy according to business plans, regulatory requirements, skills availability, and also the rapidly changing nature of the technologies,” he explains, with a hint of resignation about the pace of the industry.

One facet of that new strategy was reducing the company’s overall IT footprint where possible, without impacting the quality of the service provided to the group’s various business units, and customers.

“Consolidation was important, not just to reduce costs, but to make the infrastructure more agile and efficient, to improve operations, and to enhance disaster recovery. “Consolidation didn’t just involve servers and datacentres though,” he adds. “It involved every major system that makes up the group’s infrastructure. The focus was to shift to continual infrastructure refinement [as opposed to periodic overhauls], because, after all, this is a ‘never ending story’.”

During the process of its strategy review, the company identified two possible strategies. One would see it invest in its own datacentres, building up and maintaining its own infrastructure, while the other was to bring in an outside partner to co-locate its services, creating a hybrid cloud.

“Building a new datacentre would have been a multi-million dollar investment for us,” admits Teklit. “After some financial analysis to see whether [building our own datacentre] provided a better return than using a hosting company, an informed decision was made to choose eHosting DataFort as a co-location partner.”