International Airlines Group picks Red Hat

IAG has expanded its use of Red Hat Virtualization to provide the server infrastructure for provisioning new Group-wide services, helping IAG improve business continuity for mission workloads at scale while also delivering the necessary agility for the Group to improve existing services and quickly bring new business applications to market. As part of IAG’s plans to provide new cloud-based services, they have also selected Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, Red Hat’s integrated solution for building and managing an open, private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud, as the basis for its OpenStack-based cloud.

The Group’s work with Red Hat started in 2003, with British Airways selecting Red Hat Enterprise Linux as its Linux-based platform to support core operational functions, including flight and passenger management. International Airlines Group was formed in 2011 following the merger of British Airways and Iberia and has since acquired Aer Lingus and Vueling. The core commitment to an open source technology backbone remained, with Red Hat Virtualization now running on more than 600 physical servers and supporting more than 7,500 virtual machines.

Offering complete enterprise virtualization management for servers and technical workstations, Red Hat Virtualization is built on the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, delivering the stability and nimbleness at scale, a necessity for growing enterprises like IAG. Within the Group, Red Hat Virtualization along with management capabilities delivered by Red Hat Satellite provides:

• More efficient flight management by providing the infrastructure and environment for IAG to overhaul their passenger check-in and luggage logging operations into a more user friendly system. Rather than requiring weeks of training like legacy “green screen” systems, IAG’s new graphical interface takes only 20 minutes to learn and greatly speeds up customer-facing activities.
• A smaller hardware footprint as Red Hat Virtualization enables IAG to get the most out of existing servers and datacenter infrastructure. High speed provisioning with new applications being delivered in minutes instead of weeks, thanks to the agility presented by Red Hat Virtualization and the unified management capabilities of Red Hat Satellite. Web servers can be up and running in 15 minutes versus hours or days, time-to-market for new services is decreased and seasonal spikes can be anticipated and reacted to in real-time, all contributing to a smoother passenger journey and improved employee productivity.

With Red Hat Virtualization acting as the foundation for IAG’s push towards digital transformation, the Group’s next step is to embrace cloud computing. Using Red Hat’s open technologies as the flexible base for future operations, including Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, a comprehensive solution that supports organizations on their journey from traditional datacenter virtualization to OpenStack-powered clouds, IAG hopes to increase savings while improving service availability, all as part of its mission to deliver a smoother, stress-free journey for its customers. Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure is a single subscription offering that includes Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Virtualization, Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Satellite, and Red Hat Insights.