Clubessential, a provider of a full suite of membership and club management solutions to country, golf, city, yacht, and other private clubs, has selected Green House Data’s hybrid cloud solution to better address expanding business needs and guest expectations of its growing client roster.
Clubessential’s unified suite of software modules helps enhance, automate, and facilitate operations for over 1,300 golf clubs, country clubs, yacht clubs, athletic clubs, and resorts, which together serve over two million members worldwide.
By taking care of day-to-day business needs, including public websites, accounting, point-of-sale, customer relationship management, and reservations, Clubessential solutions would empower club staff to focus on what matters most: delivering superior guest experiences.
Following a period of substantial growth, both organically and via strategic acquisition, Clubessential needed to modernize an inherited legacy IT environment being used to host front- and back-end web applications, as well as Payment Card Industry (PCI)-compliant payment applications. This aging infrastructure was housed in a less-than-ideal colocation data center environment and required substantial upgrades, including virtualizations, consolidation, and business continuity measures.
High I/O Performance
After considering numerous options, Clubessential determined that a hybrid cloud solution with Green House Data provided an ideal fit for their needs. Green House Data’s team worked closely with Clubessential to architect, test, and roll out redundant VMware virtual servers. This, in conjunction with a custom private cloud using colocated hardware and dedicated SSDs for high I/O performance.
“The private cloud Green House Data provided was able to give us the high performance we needed for our data layer,” said Jason House, Clubessential’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO). “We were able to put the critical hardware that was performance-sensitive in the private cloud, and then all the dynamic web servers and things we could scale up and down based on traffic in the public cloud.”
Windows and SQL Servers
Ultimately, nearly 40 physical Windows and SQL servers were consolidated down to 15 virtual servers with minimal to no downtime. It would help modernize the environment while significantly reducing licensing compliance requirements and costs.
To assess the solution’s impact on client experience, Clubessential looked to its central performance metric – SQL server waits, or the time a SQL server waits on CPU, RAM, or disk to deliver needed data to the web server. Post-migration, Clubessential’s SQL server wait times dropped between 40 and 50 percent.
“We were actively measuring database performance pre- and post-migration because that’s what causes customers to notice problems,” added Mr. House. “The comparison charts were night and day.”
Beyond these benefits, the solution would enable the cloud environment to be managed remotely through the VMware layer, with physical hardware managed by Green House Data staff onsite in Cheyenne.
