Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, the second-largest cruise line in the world, recently upgraded its data warehouse to include an IBM FlashSystem Enterprise Solution, comprised of two mirrored IBM FlashSystem 820 arrays behind the IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC).

Jeanine Graham-Bellamy, director of Technology for Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, told theCUBE during IBM Edge2015 that the global company needed immediate access to data.

A solution to understand customers

“We have a lot of data that we had to capture before, during and after the cruise,” she said. “We had to find a solution to help us understand our customers. Part of our solution was to pick up flash. Our marketing department needed the data to know how to reach out to our customers. With flash technology, our marketers can access the data faster and do more with that data.”

Royal Caribbean also benefits from SVC’s storage options. “With the flexibility that SVC gives us, we can move applications and tier the storage,” Graham-Bellamy said.

For a company that uses at least 5,000 servers and 3.6 petabytes of storage, manageability is key. “We only have five storage admins that manage all shoreside [operations] and the fleet,” Graham-Bellamy said. “I need a platform that is easy and flexible.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Edge 2015.