Just what goes on behind the closed doors of a Global Distribution System data centre? Steve Hemsley resists the urge to press any flashing buttons when he visits Amadeus in Germany
My passport is checked three times before I am allowed into Amadeus’s high-security data centre located in the small and remarkably quiet German town of Erding. I had shown it fewer times at the airport.
To the untrained eye this nondescript grey building situated 28 miles outside Munich looks like any other 23-year old German factory. But take a closer look and you realise how its military-level security demonstrates the real “value” of data to the travel industry in 2013.
There are one-metre-thick steel-reinforced concrete walls designed to withstand the waves of an explosion, no windows, 50cm-thick solid steel doors, 140 cameras watching your every move and more than 3,000 sensors to detect the slightest anomaly that might affect this business-critical operation.
The site was chosen deliberately by Amadeus’s founders Lufthansa, Air France, SAS and Iberia. Erding had no record of hurricanes or tornadoes and the chance of an earthquake hitting the town is tiny.
When my passport is confiscated at reception I realise how the importance of what goes on within these walls cannot be underestimated.
Amadeus’s technology systems support travel agents, airlines, hotels, rail and ferry operators, car rental companies and corporations around the globe, connecting them to more than 200 international markets.
If the technology fails or the software is sabotaged, the travel trade will lose millions of pounds every second. Planes won’t take off and consumers won’t be able to book, pay or check in.
Few people get to venture as deep into this sensitive data centre as I am today. In fact only 20 of the near-600 staff at Erding have an access-all-areas pass. Every employee has a different access profile that restricts where they can go. Even the boss, European vice-president global operations Wolfgang Krips, cannot just walk anywhere he wants to within the data centre.
Krips tells me that there have been problems in the past. Last summer flight bookings were disrupted for almost two hours when the “leap second” (where an extra second was added to the world clock to account for the slowing rotation of the earth) caused a bug in Amadeus’s airline reservation system. This confused web servers around the world and forced panicking airline staff to switch to manual check-ins.
“We lost 25% of our infrastructure, which had a significant impact on our customers, but we reacted very quickly,” says Krips. “We are constantly looking at ways to make our processes and technology more robust, such as introducing more automation. We know the impact on our customers if our systems fail.”
Indeed, Amadeus is judged by how it responds to such difficulties and how it reassures its customers that their data and its systems are secure. A fear that customers might lose confidence is why security is so tight and why back-up procedures are so vigorous. Business continuation is crucial for Amadeus and its clients and there are several generators and cooling machines, for example, ready to power into action if needed.
Krips describes his engineers as the most important people in the company. So thorough is the recruitment process to attract the right skills that workers come from all over the world. There are 51 nationalities represented at Erding and the official language is English.
Our guide is pleasant and knowledgeable, but watchful of his guest. As a journalist I am tempted to sneak into areas marked private and to take photos of objects I shouldn’t. I am quickly banned from taking a snap of the large iron door and turnstile we are led through on our way to the data centre’s most sensitive areas.
Once inside the data centre itself (in fact, three individual centres under one roof) I see the first of 6,500 buzzing servers that handle 26,000 travel transactions, bookings and check-ins every second.
I immediately sense the temperature drop, thanks to the cooling systems that ensure the servers do not overheat.
The rooms are spacious and airy but the environment is clinical.
It is hard to believe that what goes on in this impersonal building makes holiday dreams come true for millions of travellers.
Round the clock
Amadeus never sleeps. Its “follow-the-sun” approach means that when German staff go home, their colleagues in Miami take over. When both are in bed, Sydney steps up.
This is why when I tour the centre at 6pm only two staff out of the usual 15 are working in the Operations Bridge (which looks rather like the bridge from Star Trek’s Starship Enterprise). This is the data centre’s brain and as I manage to negotiate a picture of me sitting at the main central control desk I mischievously think what might happen if I press a flashing button. I resist the urge.
Clinical as it may be, the big data work going on inside this building is already helping travel sellers and buyers make better decisions, to be more innovative and to boost customer loyalty so everyone ultimately makes more money.
As I exit the data centre I feel like I have emerged from a sci-fi theme park ride. I am given back my passport and allowed to leave, watched closely by security.
The numbers