Gulf Air Builds Private Cloud for Big Data Innovation With Red Hat Technologies
The Kingdom of Bahrain’s national carrier realizes its social media
monitoring ambitions without additional hardware investment
RALEIGH, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source
solutions, today announced that Gulf Air, the national carrier of the
Kingdom of Bahrain, has created a private cloud IT environment with Red
Hat solutions. As part of this project, Gulf Air has deployed Red Hat
Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss
EAP), and Red Hat Storage as the platform for its innovative big data
solution, Arabic Sentiment Analysis.
Established in 1950, Gulf Air is one of the Middle East’s first
commercial airlines and today it is a major international carrier, with
a fleet of 28 modern aircraft serving 39 cities in 22 countries across
three continents. The company prides itself on offering traditional
Arabian hospitality and is committed to being an industry leader in
developing products and services that reflect the evolving needs and
aspirations of its passengers. In the age of social media, that also
entails monitoring and analysis of online conversations about Gulf Air.
Gulf Air has developed a sentiment analysis solution based on big data
technologies that is capable of addressing social media posts in both
Arabic and English for Arabic Sentiment Analysis. The solution is based
on an open source Hadoop big data framework running across a server
cluster in Gulf Air’s private cloud environment and using Red Hat
products including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss EAP, and Red Hat
Storage.
Gulf Air’s private cloud encompasses 200 servers running more than 100
core applications and holds more than 50 terabytes of data. The
scalability that Gulf Air achieves in this environment with Red Hat
solutions provides sufficient capacity to host the big data solution,
which in turn helped Gulf Air avoid additional infrastructure investment
including hardware expenditure.
Today, Arabic Sentiment Analysis processes social media posts and
provides easy-to-understand reports on what customers are saying about
Gulf Air. Gulf Air's IT team also uses them as the basis for a wider
analysis of the state of the market and actions taken by their
competitors. Big data projects can come with a hefty bill, but Gulf Air
believes that the Arabic Sentiment Analysis has been delivered
cost-effectively, thanks in part to the company’s enthusiasm for open
source solutions.
Supporting Quotes
Dr. Jassim Haji, director of information technology, Gulf Air
“As an airline, it is crucial to know what our customers are thinking.
We want to know who is satisfied with Gulf Air’s service, who is not and
why, and what Gulf Air can do to improve its services to passengers. The
big data solution deployed is an open source one, which meant no special
license fees to pay, while the infrastructure where it runs is based on
our existing open source-based cloud environment and virtual servers,
which meant no hardware investment was required.”
Ranga Rangachari, vice president and general manager, Storage and Big
Data, Red Hat
“Gulf Air is a fantastic example of a global customer that is solving
business challenges and embracing the potential of big data with open
source solutions and Red Hat. Using open, software-defined storage as
the basis of their big data platform and private cloud offers Gulf Air a
more cost-effective, scalable, and flexible environment that can meet
their existing and future needs. We're thrilled to collaborate with them
to enable their big data success.”
Additional Resources
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Red Hat, Inc.
Daniel Thompson, 978-589-1059
dthompso@redhat.com
Source: Red Hat, Inc.