British Airways increases scalability, reliability, flexibility and
performance while building on its IT infrastructure using Red Hat
Enterprise Virtualization
RALEIGH, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source
solutions, today announced that British Airways, a global airline and
market leader in the travel industry, has deployed Red Hat Enterprise
Virtualization on its infrastructure. Through this Red Hat technology,
British Airways is benefiting from a highly available and scalable IT
architecture.
As the flag carrier airline of the United Kingdom (U.K.), British
Airways has operated for more than 90 years, and today is the largest
airline in the U.K. based on fleet size, international flights and
international destinations, flying more than 40 million passengers to
177 destinations around the globe each year. In line with the company's
growth and additional business requirements for its production
environment - and, in particular, to support the production environment
for its external website, BA.com - British Airways needed to expand its
IT infrastructure. As consumers have shifted their airline ticket buying
patterns, British Airways supports on average in excess of 450,000
visitors to BA.com per day.
Looking for a solution that would support their projected future growth
and anticipated additional e-commerce traffic, British Airways
identified Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as the best solution for
its Linux workloads - in terms of functionality, value, and avoidance of
vendor lock-in - for the production environment that supports its
website and other workloads such as internal applications, both
pre-production and production.
British Airways found that, as an enterprise-ready open source
virtualization solution, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization offered a
more cost-effective option than proprietary virtualization offerings,
and it worked well with other elements of their open source IT
infrastructure, including systems based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and
Red Hat Satellite. With Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, British
Airways has deployed 750 virtual machines on 130 physical hosts across
two datacenters, replacing a previously virtualized estate.
British Airways' new IT infrastructure has reaped several important
benefits in areas such as administration and ongoing efficiency for
developers at the company. Richard Dawson, a UNIX and Linux
infrastructure consultant at British Airways, explained:
"We use Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to create our own cloud so
that our developers can use it to build their own virtual machines and
hence build and control environments as they wish. We have used Red Hat
solutions in various parts of our business for ten years, and we are
pleased to continue our long-standing relationship by deploying Red Hat
Enterprise Virtualization. As developers need to create and delete
environments quickly, a highly scalable solution is critical for us and
this advantage then means that we don't need to over-commit on our IT
plans.
"As an operation that functions 365 days a year with a plane always in
the sky, high availability is key for the safety of our operation and
ultimately our customers. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization now enables
us to have a single-pane view as to what is going on in the whole
environment which we didn't have before.
"We have been using Red Hat in various parts of our business for ten
years and so the relationship with Red Hat is already cemented hence we
wanted to continue that. We used Red Hat Consulting for the migration,
as it was a more efficient model to use trained experts than to employ
and then train people of our own. The service was of a high level and
delivered within time frame."
In particular, British Airways recognized the benefit of a dedicated Red
Hat Technical Account Manager to build
an in-depth technical knowledge of British Airways' technical
environment, and as a result, prevent issues using proactive planning,
technical reviews and on-site visits.
"Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization offers a no-compromise virtualization
solution for Linux workloads - industry-leading performance coupled with
a compelling ROI," said Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager,
Virtualization and OpenStack, Red Hat. "We're delighted about the
successful deployment and value British Airways is deriving from Red Hat
Enterprise Virtualization as well as the opportunity to offer our
services across Consulting, Technical Account Management and Support for
faster time to solution."
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enterprises, partners, and open source communities, Red Hat helps create
relevant, innovative technologies that liberate resources for growth and
prepare customers for the future of IT. Learn more at http://www.redhat.com.
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Stephanie Wonderlick, 571-421-8169
swonderl@redhat.com
Source: Red Hat, Inc.
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