"ServePath Tailors State-of-the-Art Server Hosting Solution to Local Joie de Vivre Hospitality"
Situation
When Michael Stano joined Joie de Vivre Hospitality as Director of IT last year, he was concerned with the state of the company’s IT infrastructure. “When I first came onboard, our IT infrastructure lacked organization and was clearly not well positioned to facilitate centralization nor future growth,” Stano explains. “The IT systems needed to be better integrated and ultimately support increased reliability, performance, and supportability. Servers were kept onsite at each of the individual hotels, and we had virtually no systematic processes or programs in place for appropriate maintenance, management, data backup or data protection.”
Based in San Francisco, Joie de Vivre Hospitality operates 34 boutique hotels in the Bay Area as well as hotels in other parts of California. Despite being Northern California’s largest independent hotelier, Joie de Vivre Hospitality is a relatively small company with limited resources for IT, and thus did not have the internal network skills required to do the hosting themselves. They needed an outside vendor to provide the network reliability and performance they required while staying within their limited budget and resource constraints. The challenge for Stano was to come up with a strategic roadmap for the overall IT infrastructure to support key, centralized applications for all of its properties. The goal was to develop a highly customized solution that would easily accommodate centralized, missioncritical information, such as financial and guest data for all of JdV’s hotels. With these requirements came the need for a robust, redundant, scalable architecture that would afford them the stability and foundation required to integrate each of their hotels and restaurants into a centrally controlled and secured environment.
Solution
ServePath presented Joie de Vivre Hospitality with a customized solution that addressed their concerns and met all their IT and management requirements. ServePath provided not only state-of-the-art colocation and network services, but also implemented a redundant failover network and architecture that met Joie de Vivre Hospitality’s performance needs. Accomplishing this required integrating their network connection at ServePath with that of their private VPN network to allow distribution to each of the hotel and restaurant locations.
The fact that ServePath is a local company, who owns and operates their own San Francisco data center, was definitely significant in Stano’s decision to place the servers with them. “I met with a lot of vendors, both local and out of state,” Stano explains. “But because we are based here in San Francisco, we prefer to partner with local companies who we can foster a strong partnership with. Because of the scope of this project, we want ServePath to not only have an extremely close working relationship with us, but also with our other vendors. Knowing that ServePath is right here in the city and always available
Results
For Joie de Vivre Hospitality, this is the first time that their servers are not located in each of the individual hotels, but instead kept in a centralized data center. This will centralize the server networks and allow for automated updates across each of the hotel properties, keeping their guest data and financial systems data accurate and secure. Working with ServePath has so far been nothing but positive, Michael Stano is happy to state: “ServePath’s customized yet affordable server hosting solutions, exceptional technical support, and the passionate drive and knowledge displayed by ServePath employees are the main reasons that the project has been so highly successful.”
About Joie de Vivre Hospitality
Based in San Francisco, Joie de Vivre Hospitality is a creative collection of lifestyle businesses. As the largest boutique hotel operator in California, Joie de Vivre currently accommodates over 600,000 room nights per year. Their portfolio includes 34 hotels, eight restaurants and bars, and three day spas. The Joy of Life Club, Joie de Vivre Hospitality’s loyalty program which has more than 30,000 members, is one of the most successful boutique hotel loyalty programs in the country.
About ServePath
ServePath is the leading dedicated server specialist in the Western United States, and one of Silicon Valley’s largest and fastest growing Internet service providers. ServePath provides powerful, affordable server hosting, custom-built to meet intensive and mission-critical hosting requirements. Their Screaming-Fast Network™ and state-of-the-art data center located at the heart of the global Internet deliver guaranteed performance and uptime to thousands of business customers worldwide.