Les Taxis Bleus (Blue Taxi) is moving its Oracle software-based order processing and reservation management system to a new SGI Altix XE server and SGI InfiniteStorage solution to guarantee fast, reliable service to taxi customers 24 hours a day. The company serves as a booking centre for more than 3000 independent cab drivers throughout Paris and the Ile-de France, or Paris Region.

"On any given day, we'll take 40,000 calls from customers in need of taxis", stated Patrick Del'Vecchio, director, IT systems, Les Taxis Bleus. "We needed a system that shortens wait times for customers and works non-stop, day and night. With this SGI solution running our Oracle database and transaction processing system, we're always ready for the daily onslaught of call and transaction traffic."

The Taxis Bleus system is designed to efficiently serve a city that never sleeps. A staff of 120 Taxis Bleus call centre agents takes cab requests via telephone and enters them into a reservation system. A radio link then automatically dispatches the order by interactively communicating with drivers via a device located inside each cab. An on-board electronic payment terminal sends the customer's credit card information back to the server to complete the transaction. The SGI and Oracle solution also drives Taxis Bleus' internal accounting system.

To ensure 100 percent availability, the company maintains fully redundant server and storage systems. Transaction processing and radio communications are administered via a four-core SGI Altix XE240 server equipped with 8GB of memory and running Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.4. The system taps an Oracle 10g database and 1TB of SGI InfiniteStorage 220 direct-attached Fibre Channel storage, which neutralizes infrastructure bottlenecks that might otherwise impact service delivery and customer satisfaction. The entire configuration is repeated in a replicated configuration that backs up the primary system.

SGI installed the system in May with assistance from Aenix, a major French systems integrator. An SGI customer for years, Les Taxis Bleus decided to move to the Altix XE platform to take advantage of the latest multi-core Intel Xeon processors. The company also wanted to leverage the scalability and reliability of the Altix and InfiniteStorage platforms to rapidly and efficiently handle transaction volumes as they grow.

"It was absolutely essential for Les Taxis Bleus to look to the future when investing in our enterprise IT infrastructure, and this was a key reason for choosing the SGI solution", added Patrick Del'Vecchio. "Not only will this new solution allow us to cut transaction times for our current base of 12 million customers annually, but we have the headroom to handle significantly more - without any degradation in service quality. For us, this is a mission-critical solution, and SGI has understood that from the beginning."

SGI's enterprise solutions process and manage large amount of data faster and more affordably than any solution in their class - including offerings from IBM, HP and Sun. SGI's expertise in designing dense, energy-efficient systems, along with its reliance on technologies based on open standards, gives enterprises the advantage of record-breaking performance from solutions that cost less to acquire and maintain. In addition to Intel Xeon processor-based SGI Altix XE systems, the SGI Altix family includes servers featuring Intel Itanium 2 processors. Based on real-world customer results, those Altix systems have been shown to run Oracle databases up to five times faster than IBM pSeries servers.