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 Carnival Cruise Lines' Net Sails The High Seas To access a gif file of the Ce nterfold graphic, click here. It may take some time to load in your browser! 
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By Mona R. Litt It helps provide a carnival of magical fun and a cruise of your dreams, but how does Carnival Cruise Lines' computer network stay afloat while making fantasies come true on the high seas? It takes more than fairy dust. For Carnival, it takes a network that stretches from the cruise line's Miami headquarters to its fleet of pleasure vessels. "Our goal is to make access to data easy for our users," says John Masseria, Carnival Cruise Lines' system support manager. "A person's network connection should be as reliable as the dial tone on a phone." A CELLplex 7000 HD ATM switch from 3Com Corp. provides the ATM backbone that connects the two-building complex to 11 cruise ship operations. Carnival migrated its network from an FDDI backbone to ATM last July. Masseria wanted to avoid using shared media and chose ATM for better performance and fault tolerance. A satellite links the entire network to individual vessels. Ships also can access telephone service via this satellite link from the cruise line's main system. Revenue records are tracked and stored on a Unisys Corp. 2200/900 mainframe system. Carnival runs a custom-written cashless payment application on the Unisys mainframe so that guests do not have to pay cash for purchases. Instead, they receive "sail and sign cards"--the equivalent of shipboard credit cards. The card is swiped for every purchase and recorded by using the Micros application. A Sun Microsystems SPARCserver transfers information to the mainframe that's used to settle accounts at the end of cruise. If guests exceed their credit limit, Carnival employees ca n automatically authorize additional transactions against the traveler's own credit card recorded during the embarkation process. About 2,000 users are connected to the network as well as the company intranet. The intranet includes Netscape Commerce Server software running on an Indy server platform from Silicon Graphics. Carnival uses its intranet primarily to store its WordPerfect documents in HTML format. "The employee handbook is printed for people all the time. We want to post it on our internal Web site instead," says Masseria. This plan, he notes, should take shape within six months to a year. Potential Carnival guests and travel agents can learn more about the cruise lines from the Web site at www.Carnival.com. They can find information about the comp any itself, as well as electronic copies of brochures. Maps and itineraries also are available. The largest user population on the network is the reservations department. About 380 agents process transactions daily from travel agencies, storing all information on the mainframe. Other departments log on for anything from data processing to credit-card authorizations. "Our goal is to have one single point to sign on to the network," Masseria explains. "As the user moves from application to application, server to server, there should only be a single point." Carnival uses SQL Server databases running on Windows NT and conducts most print services utilizing NetWare. Masseria expects to migrate to NT shortly. |
Updated Februayr 7, 1997 |
