Organization

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

Industry

Transportation & Logistics

Business Requirements

For an airline business tending to millions of passengers on a daily basis, agility and flexibility is of paramount importance. The airline businesses realized that they did not want to deal with the complexity of maintaining legacy infrastructure. They wanted mobility, agility, flexibility and speed to enhance their customer experience and improve their business operations.

Solution

• StoneFly USS™ Hyperconverged Infrastructure
• VMware Horizon

Challenge

The airline wanted to deploy a dynamic and agile work environment so that they could enhance the experience for their customers.

“Hundreds of flights are coming in and going out every day carrying thousands of passengers. 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. It (data) has to be there, it has to be accessible, and we cannot wait for it because our passengers don’t like to wait” noted David, the Operations manager for the airline.

Disruption was bad for businesses but they didn’t want to hinder processes by testing environments their staff wasn’t comfortable with. The solution that our experts suggested delivered them the familiar Vmware environment that leveraged StoneFly’s highly scalable and robust Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI).

Our solution delivered more than what they expected; facilitating the dynamic workflow of their business and enabling them to build a future-proof architecture for a variety of future use-cases.

The StoneFly USS Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) Experience

The Unified Storage & Server (USS) hyperconverged appliance is built to support to VMware, Hyper-V and Citrix (XenServer) hypervisors, so the HCI performs ideally with the VMware Horizon integration.

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

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

Brian, IT Manager 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.

Result

By setting up StoneFly USS with VMware Horizon, the airline company enhanced productivity without having to deal with the complexities of dealing with traditional infrastructures. In summary, our solution delivered the following results for the organization:

Simplified Management

The familiar VMware environment made it easier for the IT staff personnel to manage the active workloads. 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 on a server that’s purpose-built for it. That was a huge plus for us” – noted Claire, the DevOps team member for the airline company.

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. And 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; making it a future-proof 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 Brain

Better ROI & TCO

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