MEININGER is a Europe-wide hotel group with a centrally managed booking system as its business-critical core application. The IT infrastructure was based on a traditional, organically grown server architecture with limited scalability. As the group expanded, system performance and stability reached their limits.

The central booking system generated weekly complaints from hotels. Specific issues included:

• Long response times for booking and availability queries
• Performance degradation under high load, particularly during campaigns and seasonal peaks
• Increased support effort due to recurring incidents

The goal was to significantly improve performance and stability without operational disruption.

DaPhi developed a hybrid infrastructure architecture with MEININGER based on a hyperconverged environment in close collaboration with Lenovo and VMware.

DaPhi analysed the actual workloads of the booking system with timing measurements at application and database level to precisely identify bottlenecks and unlock measurable optimisation potential.

The solution consolidated previously separate compute, storage, and network resources into a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). The transition to a virtualised, software-defined platform created a significantly more flexible and scalable architecture. In parallel, DaPhi developed a hybrid cloud strategy where critical core systems remained on-premises while scalable workloads could be extended flexibly into the cloud.

The live migration with production data was particularly challenging. DaPhi built a parallel test environment with real-time communication between old and new systems, enabling validation with live booking data without any downtime. Final optimisation included targeted resource tuning, storage optimisation, and network segmentation, through which DaPhi sustainably reduced latencies.

Close coordination among all project participants enabled the transition without operational disruption, a critical success factor in 24/7 hotel operations.

Working with MEININGER, we achieved:

1. Significantly reduced downtime, eliminating performance complaints
2. Ensured scalability for continued chain growth
3. Amortised infrastructure costs through reduced operational effort

Overall, measurable improvements in performance, stability, and confidence in IT.

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