Open Source Blog

Sabre Holdings, parent company to Travelocity, Sabre Travel Network and Sabre Airline Solutions, announced it relies on Red Hat for “increased performance, system reliability and scalability for its mission-critical open systems”. Compared to proprietary Unix/RISC solutions during benchmarking, Sabre said its testing has proven that Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel performs, “three times faster and at a fraction of the cost”.

“While operating the largest travel distribution service in the world, we develop solutions that must withstand what is perhaps the highest sustainable volumes anywhere, peaking at 32,000 transactions per second, available 24x7, with five-nines uptime,” said Robert Wiseman, chief technology officer at Sabre Holdings. “It’s always a peak business hour somewhere in the world. Few other systems anywhere require more rigor, but with Red Hat we are able to build stronger and smarter systems with our global customers in mind.”

“Sabre Holdings turned to open source to replace its former proprietary technology in order to improve the stability, performance and cost-effectiveness of its IT infrastructure and to ensure reliability for its customers,” Red Hat boasted. “The company evaluated the leading Linux offerings on the market, and ultimately chose Red Hat for its established market leadership and renowned support offerings. With Red Hat, Sabre also discovered the power of the developer community that could provide reliable, consistent updates and fixes that could be incorporated in realtime.”

“Sabre Holdings selected Red Hat as the IT solution that would allow us to run all our businesses most effectively,” said Josh Hartman, chief technology officer at Travelocity. “Our Travelocity customers use our services for the content, speed, price and presentation, not for the operating system our business runs on. Red Hat provides a proficient and effervescent experience for our customers, who don't even realize that Red Hat is there. And that's the way it should be.”

With millions of online customers generating tens of thousands of transactions per second, Sabre uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on “thousands” of HP x86 servers and continues to expand its use of Red Hat solutions today, it said. Two years ago, Sabre acquired lastminute.com, a leader in European online travel and today, Sabre is in the process of migrating all of lastminute.com's servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled Sabre to standardize its IT architecture, consisting of thousands of systems worldwide, across all three of its companies’ IT infrastructures. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux is our corporate standard – all new systems are required to deploy on Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” said Wiseman. “Compared to proprietary Unix/RISC solutions, our testing has shown that Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel performs three times faster at a fraction of the cost.”