British Airways has deployed Red Hat’s Enterprise Virtualization solution for a scalable IT system to support its future growth and handle additional e-commerce traffic.
The Red Hat system is expected to support company’s additional business needs for its production environment as well as expand its IT infrastructure in order support the production environment for its website, BA.com.
British Airways says that the open source platform will help it handle Linux workloads – in terms of functionality, value, and avoidance of vendor lock-in as well as support its website and other workloads such as internal applications, both pre-production and production.
The move follows a shift in airline ticket buying patterns as BA.com handles more than 450,000 visitors to per day.
British Airways UNIX and Linux infrastructure consultant Richard Dawson said the company uses Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to create its own cloud so that its developers can use it to build their own virtual machines and hence build and control environments as they wish.
"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," Dawson added.
According to the airline company, the open source virtualisation system is cost-effective and works well with its other open source IT infrastructure elements including systems based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Satellite.
The new system has enabled British Airways to deploy 750 virtual machines on 130 physical hosts in its two datacentres.
Red Hat Virtualization and OpenStack general manager Radhesh Balakrishnan said, "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."
