Hotwire customer story

Overview

Hotwire.com is a leading Internet discount travel site dedicated to delivering consistently lower prices on airfare, hotel rooms, car rentals, vacation packages and cruises. The company negotiates deep discounts from its travel suppliers to help sell their excess inventory, and offers advanced search technology to help consumers find the best deal for their needs.

Hotwire’s IT infrastructure is the very definition of business-critical. The company’s success depends on the close cooperation of the networking team, which works to keep the site secure, available and responsive 24/7, and its software engineering team, which is responsible for matching customer searches with available supplier inventory.

Solution

• The AppResponse Xpert appliance deployed in co-location center
• Real-time and historical view of a wide range of application and network metrics
• Insight into server and network components of application performance

When you’re dealing with the Internet, you can’t instrument it like you can an application or a server that you own and control. Previous to our purchase of [Riverbed® AppResponse Xpert® Appliance], we didn’t have the necessary information we needed to really nail down network problems, so problem solving was often a process of educated guesswork and a lot of iterative tweaks.

Brian Tam, Senior Network Engineer

Hotwire

I can see at a glance whether we’re dealing with a back-end or network problem and get the right team members involved from the very beginning.

Brian Tam, Senior Network Engineer

Hotwire