Company Updates

Skyscanner Speeds Travel Planning with Dell Converged Blade Data Centers

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Snow-covered mountain range and blue skyAs scenes of snow-covered mountains and skiing play out on televisions around the world, many of us may begin thinking about our next vacation.

Our customer Skyscanner wants to help with that by “building the best global flight search site” according to Gareth Williams, their CEO and co-founder. “And we are now bringing the same technical innovation and global focus as we expand across other areas of their travel journey."

That sort of expansion, coupled with rapid growth in 2013, growing visitors by 100 percent as well as doubling mobile app downloads, meant they needed powerful data center systems to support millions of unique user sessions every day. It’s an inspiring story for a company born of a simple excel spreadsheet.

During the past year, Skyscanner expanded beyond the European market, with offices in Singapore and Beijing, and an office in Miami, to grow its business in North and South America. The results recently noted by the BBC are:

  • Asian traffic grew last year from 14 percent of traffic to 20 percent,
  • North and South America has seen a 119 percent increase in monthly visitors, while
  • European monthly visitors to the website were up 64 percent.

Dell’s solution for that type of growth was to converge Intel-based servers, storage arrays and networking in a single chassis — the Dell Converged Blade Data Center. A proof-of-concept at Dell’s Solution Center in Limerick proved a success and the solution was rolled out across Skyscanner’s sites in the UK, Singapore, Beijing, Miami and Barcelona.

More details about those data center solutions were recently highlighted on Tech Page One where Phil Dalbeck, infrastructure architect at Skyscanner, explained: “We wanted to make a fundamental change and move from a third-party supplied compute capacity to our own highly optimized platform.”

Skyscanner’s infrastructure costs are considerable, but with the Dell Converged Blade Data Center the company is on track to reduce costs by one-third over the coming three years. Those are real business results that allow them to continue to help you find the cheapest flights, hotels, and car hire, with no added fees and no fuss.

Perhaps their list of the Ten Best Ski Resorts for Late Season Snow & Spring Skiing will be just the place for you to start planning that snow-inspired trip!

About the Author: Laura Pevehouse

Laura Pevehouse was profiled as one of five “social media mavens” in the March 2009 issue of Austin Woman Magazine and named an AdWeek’s TweetFreak Five to Follow. She has been part of the Dell organization for more than 15 years in various corporate communications, employee communications, public relations, community affairs, marketing, branding, social media and online communication roles. From 2014-2018, Laura was Chief Blogger/Editor-in-Chief for Direct2DellEMC and Direct2Dell, Dell’s official corporate blog that she help launch in 2007. She is now a member of the Dell Technologies Chairman Communications team. Earlier in her Dell career she focused on Global Commercial Channels and US Small and Medium Business public relations as part of the Global Communications team. Prior to that, she was responsible for global strategy in social media and community management, as well as marcom landing pages, as a member of Dell’s Global SMB Marketing, Brand and Creative team. When she was part of Dell’s Global Online group, Laura provided internal consulting that integrated online and social media opportunities with a focus on Corporate Communications and Investor Relations. She managed the home page of Dell.com, one of the top 500 global web sites in Alexa traffic rank, and first brought web feeds and podcasts to the ecommerce site. In her spare time she led Dell into the metaverse with the creation of Dell Island in the virtual world Second Life. Laura has earned the designation of Accredited Business Communicator from the International Association of Business Communicators, and received her Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from Louisiana State University. Before joining Dell Financial Services in 2000, she worked at the Texas Workforce Commission and PepsiCo Food Systems Worldwide.