VMware & StoneFly Solve Infrastructure Challenges for Airline

Organization

An American Airline that flies to airports all over the country. They have an average of 550 daily flights carrying millions of customers to different parts of the country.

Industry

Transportation & Logistics

Challenge

As an airline company servicing millions of passengers on a daily basis, agility and flexibility is of paramount importance. Passenger data, flight information, and passenger service is at the heart of their daily operations and any downtime could spell out disaster that would cost them millions. 

Their outdated legacy data storage infrastructure could not meet the challenge. The storage system was rigid and difficult to scale. If the client needed to add storage space, they would have to plan a long time in advance to account for the long time between order and delivery. On top of that, the client often had disruptions to their daily operations when upgrading their systems and on several occasions had downtime of more than three hours. Moreover, the larger their systems grew, the more complex, difficult and expensive it became to maintain. In order to continue providing an enhanced customer experience, the client needed a solution that scaled quickly and was easy to manage. 

“With a heavy flow of  incoming and outgoing traffic every day, we have to make sure that every flight is on time and every passenger is comfortable on their journey with us. So our staff and the entire operations cannot tolerate being unable to access an important program or application or a file. The data has to be ready and accessible because our passengers don’t like to wait” noted David, the Operations manager for the airline.

Solution

To help the client with their operational challenges, our team of Technical Specialists offered the client Stonefly’s USS Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI) as a solution. The USS appliance provides a highly scalable and robust hyper-converged infrastructure that is compatible with all mainstream hypervisors including VMware Horizon, the hypervisor our client was already using. The comprehensive range of compatible hypervisors allowed their staff to configure and deploy the StoneFly solution without interrupting their workflow by testing environments their team wasn’t familiar with.

Result

StoneFly’s USS appliance integrated with VMware Horizon was able to enhance productivity without having to deal with the complexities of traditional infrastructures. The solution delivered more than what our client had expected by facilitating the dynamic workflow of their business and enabling them to build a future-proof architecture for a variety of quickly evolving use-cases.

Simplified Management

The familiar VMware environment made it easy for the IT staff personnel to manage the active workloads without interrupting the workflow. The centralized management console enabled the IT team to reduce complexities by automating management for deployment, configuration, provisioning, patching and upgrades.

“Our team isn’t new to VMware so we were excited to find out that we would be working on the same environment we’re familiar with that is on a server purpose-built for it. That was a huge plus for us” – noted Claire, the DevOps team member.

Highly Scalable Architecture

StoneFly hyperconverged infrastructure is capable of scaling out to virtually unlimited number of appliance nodes delivering petabyte scale storage capacity with a proportional increase in performance. As a VMware technology partner, our appliance scalability is also supported by VMware’s virtual solutions. The hypervisor can seamlessly integrate the increased number of nodes and deliver the complete infrastructure experience to the user, future-proofing the system’s dynamic architecture.

“We’re happy with what we have and we can scale when we want to. That’s the kind of flexibility most suited for our kind of use” said Brian, the IT Manager.

Easy Configuration and Quick Deployment

StoneFly has designed their appliance’s configuration and deployment stages with simplicity and speed in mind. They have a dedicated team of highly trained technical support that are committed to helping customers 24/7 365 days a year. Additionally, the team has created a library of resources from step by step configuration videos, manuals, and guides to aid any question. Moreover, any third party software that comes integrated into the appliance (VmWare in this case) is known front to back by tech support specialists. Therefore, customers only need to go to one place to get all their questions answered. 

When we received our infrastructure, everything was pre-configured. We just had to assemble it and set it up.” – Claire, the DevOps team member for the airline company.

The airline IT staff leveraged the USS appliance to deploy VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) and configure virtual desktops. They started with only 50 virtual desktops but then quickly expanded to a 100 VDs within the next three months.

“Configuring and deploying VDIs has never been simpler, we really love what we can do with this infrastructure”

Better Return on Investment (ROI) & Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Replacing the previous outdated systems, the newly deployed infrastructure provided a greater return on investment and total cost of ownership. By simplifying management and consolidating multiple solutions into a single solution, the client greatly reduced the expenses that were previously required for maintenance. As a result, the company was able to reduce customer dissatisfaction due to downtime related issues, and use their budget to increase their service offerings and flights. 

“We got so much more than what we originally planned for. To have so much in a single solution saves us a significant amount of money and time. Instead of investing in multiple solutions, we save a lot of budget by using StoneFly’s HCI and VMware which allows us to channel our budget to improving our customer’s experience. It’s a win-win situation.” said Brian, the IT manager.

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