The hospitality business is a round-the-clock environment where systems are constantly in demand, and going offline to perform upgrades is always inconvenient.

With four existing hotels and a world-class conference center under construction, Celtic Manor Resort Ltd, a hotel group based in Wales, U.K., looked to Dell EMC and VMware Inc. for a seamless and secure upgrade from its existing converged infrastructure to a more agile, automated, hyperconverged environment.

“We’re a 24-hour business in a resort hotel, and we have … little time to do any upgrades, so resilience within that environment was key to us for our uptime,” said Chris Stanley (pictured, left), information technology manager at Celtic Manor Resort. “[With VxRail] there is that automation of balancing your workloads, not having someone there watching it all the time. … So we’ve got more time to concentrate on the guests and how we can make their experience better.”

Stanley was joined by Lee Caswell (pictured, right), vice president of products, storage and availability at VMware Inc., for an interview with John Walls (@JohnWalls21) host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor), principal at The CTO Advisor, during the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed Celtic Manor’s rapid migration from converged infrastructure to a hyperconverged environment. (* Disclosure below.)

Partnership empowers VxRail HCI

“We have 500,000 customers who are familiar with vCenter. And if you know vCenter, you know vSAN, you know VxRail,” Caswell said, encouraging existing VMware clients to make the move to hyperconverged infrastructure, as Celtic Manor did. “The ability for us to partner with Dell EMC, who understands what it means to be supporting in a data-centric world … that’s part of the powerful concept of VxRail,” he added.

The power is in the partnership, according to Stanley. “VMware being so tightly integrated with [Dell EMC’s] VxRail was our main call against the other vendors; it’s the best chef with the best ingredients,” he said, comparing Celtic Manor’s selection of VxRail to choosing the most experienced and prepared caterer for an event.

Celtic Manor runs mission-critical operations on VMware’s vSAN in VxRail. “All our core systems are written on it … big Oracle databases, SQL, and our exchange servers,” Stanley said.

A real-life test of VxRail’s disaster recovery systems occurred during Celtic Manor’s migration from its old converged infrastructure. “We added on the SANs to the hyperconverged so we could see them migrate over,” Stanley said. “A couple of servers didn’t take too well to that … but we used the recover point within VxRail, and literally [went] back five, 10 minutes … and we were back up and running.”

While Stanley wishes his first experience hadn’t been in a live environment, the experience was a positive one. “It filled us with a lot of confidence now that we have that resilience going forward in an environment,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Technologies World 2018 event. (* Disclosure: VMware Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither VMware nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE