Case Study

Transacting with open source

Nivedan Prakash says that RHEL has helped Cleartrip by fetching search responses for travel/ticketing queries faster, protecting investments in servers and lowering TCO

“Any travel related products are searched for before they are bought. Hence we wanted a fastest search response time for our business that was scalable as we are expanding our product portfolio,” said Sanjeev Sreedharan, Vice-president, Software Engineering, Cleartrip. He added, “We wanted a stable OS with maximum uptime as our business cannot afford downtime and tweaking a proprietary system was not possible.”

These were the initial thoughts when Cleartrip.com, an online travel portal, wanted to kick off its operations. The portal offers online booking for domestic air tickets as well as domestic and international hotels. The company has plans to increase its portfolio of travel products by comprehensively covering all travel products over a period of time, and simultaneously make travel simpler for its customers. In order to achieve this goal, the company deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and later upgraded to RHEL 5 across its servers in India. With the Linux operating system, Cleartrip.com has stability and scalability.

Rapid search for travelers

Cleartrip has kept its portal simple. It does not believe in having fancy banner ads or pop-ups that unnecessarily eat into available bandwidth (for both customers and its portal). The phrase ‘Search, book & go’ has resulted in the portal being kept simple. That’s not all.

The company wanted to give its customers the fastest possible search response time for travel/ticketing requirements. To make things simple for time–strapped travelers, it launched a facility, which helps customers to search dates on either side of their preferred date and see all the airline options available with a single search. While other travel portals use the same grid–based display which pre–selects the cheapest flight for and offers no filtering or sorting options, Cleartrip presents fares for different days which can be compared instantly by clicking on a tabbed interface. Similarly the company redesigned its hotel search section. The spruced up hotel section of Cleartrip boasts of speed, comprehensiveness and a range of functions that compile content. For example customers can sort through hotels by parameters such as property rating (stars), price or property name. They can then filter on the basis of factors including price, rating, location and amenities. Useful information such as photographs, ratings (stars), area information and amenities are displayed for every hotel listed on the Web site. Prices displayed are, as always, inclusive of all taxes. By default, the best lower end room rates available are displayed for each hotel. These enhancements have helped the company provide the fastest possible response time while giving a personalized experience.

Sreedharan commented, “You get the search results in less than 10 seconds. If you compare us with the other online travel portals, we have the fastest search engine. As any travel purchase decision starts with a search for a travel product, in case you do not provide a good customer experience, you will not be able to compete. We want to ensure faster response times with high performance and stability.”

Stable OS supporting growth

Cleartrip, which began its operations in June 2005 wanted to have a stable and a scalable operating system so that it would have the capability of handling additional workloads when it expanded its operations. At the same time the OS was required to meet the company’s requirements with regard to both management and administration costs.

Sreedharan said, “We wanted a stable OS—which was reliable, scalable and yet would not compromise on stability. Proprietary systems could not be tweaked and cost a big factor. Additional a proprietary OS would have got us into vendor ‘lock-in’ permanently—doing ‘incremental forced updates’ and could have forced us to go for newer hardware (servers). With Linux as the OS our investments in servers is protected. Hence we decided to use an open source Linux OS.” Additionally a majority of the company’s applications (developed in-house) were tested and developed on Linux based systems and were found be stable. This gave the additional comfort factor to run their applications on Linux.

Evaluating different Linux platforms

Cleartrip had considered different Linux flavors initially but eventually selected the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform because it found that the support services offered by the company matched its expectations. Additionally there were many companies using RHEL for their core applications in India and this proved it to be a successful enterprise platform for deployment. The company used RHEL for all its servers across India (50 servers). This implementation took place in a phased manner. During the first phase, the company implemented the RHEL Version 4 in June 2006 and then migrated to RHEL Version 5 for its production system in August 2007. Sreedharan explained, “Apart from production, the development and testing servers were also on Linux and the Oracle database was installed on a clustered environment.”

Tweaking the OS

Cleartrip bought the RHEL through resellers and implemented it with the help of its in-house team. The company used the experience of its in-house IT team who had worked on the Linux platform earlier. The IT team members primarily carried on the implementation. However in certain areas the company took the assistance of Red Hat. It took Cleartrip a month for installing, tweaking RHEL Version 4 as per its requirements. Cleartrip also wanted all the applications to run on RHEL and ensure that it got the required search response time (10 seconds). Later on it took 20 days to migrate to Enterprise Linux Version 5 in August 2007. This was because the number of servers had increased and also all the existing software ran simultaneously on the new version.

Benefiting from open source

Cleartrip has experienced better scalability and stability with RHEL. The OS has lived up to expectations and the greatest advantage is that it is easy to get inside the operating system and tune it as per requirements without any hassles.

The company has found Red Hat support services to be pretty good. Sreedharan said, “Cleartrip is definitely getting a cost advantage with RHEL. It [RHEL] is much cheaper when compared to the rest of the OS platforms. It is up to us to decide on whether we want to continue to have a subscription model, which fits in our budget. As our entire business operation applications runs on RHEL, we cannot afford any downtime. RHEL gives higher availability of applications. The OS has support our growth plans—it has been able to scale with our expansion plans.”

The RHEL platform is more reliable and is easy to administer. Being a Linux system, remote management is easy, even over slower connections. Engineers can use the limited bandwidth available from the data cards on their notebooks to remotely login and manage the OS.

Future course of action

In the coming years, the company wants to be the number one player in the online travel market and wants to keep the whole traveling experience simple and straightforward with a great customer experience. The company also wants to excel with the overall customer support experience, whether it’s the online experience or after-sales service.

Sreedharan concluded, “We want to keep our focus on customers and simplify our process and in order to do that we are also looking forward to rolling out more products in the market space. Before coming out with any new product, we do keep in mind that the product is up to the mark and as per the customers’ expectations. Our aim is to become a one-stop solution for all the travel requirements and add products to our portfolio even at the international level.”

nivedan.prakash@expressindia.com