Propelling storage to new heights

Aer Lingus is the national airline of Ireland whose primary mission is to connect Ireland with the world. It operates a fleet of 58 aircraft, on 116 routes, from central airport locations in Ireland, the UK, mainland Europe and North America, serving in excess of 11 million passengers annually while providing seamless global connectivity with its partner airlines. Aer Lingus faced the challenge of how to store huge amounts of data generated from all areas of its global business – from flight reservations to air control to internal communications – in an accessible, economical way.

Unable to scale at the speed necessary to cope with projects such as SQL databases, data warehousing and VDI deployment with its existing EMC storage, Aer Lingus looked to alleviate its problems by assessing other solutions available on the market. After conducting evaluations with various storage companies such as Apache and HP, the airline chose to supplement its EMC solution with Tegile based on the high performance and cost effectiveness of its Zebi arrays.

“With the legacy EMC storage, as soon as we reached our storage limit, we had to go back to the vendor to buy additional storage space,” said Brian Price, IT Architect at Aer Lingus. “This was both costly and an inefficient use of our IT team’s time. With the implementation of Tegile arrays, storage is no longer an issue at Aer Lingus. The deployment has given us more bang for our buck and allowed a lot more breathing space for our IT team. Tegile arrays offer storage that is rich with features to enhance data management.”

Since its successful deployment, the IT team has seen benefits with its projects, such as VDI deployment, being launched with ease. Aer Lingus has moved critical data, including its corporate file share, to the Zebi arrays further negating the need to expand its EMC solution. And, by taking advantage of Tegile’s de-duplication and compression features, Aer Lingus is able to update files in real time between each of its two data centres, ensuring business continuity.

“For companies that need to expand their existing capacity or improve their performance, being locked into legacy hardware can be an expensive and overwhelming proposition,” said Rob Commins, vice president of marketing at Tegile Systems. “Aer Lingus found that they could supplement their existing EMC solution to gain the performance and scalability that they needed while staying within their cost constraints by leveraging our ‘hybrid solution with a twist,’ allowing them to take advantage of both the future of flash and the capacity of disk. Rather than continually investing in expensive, additional storage space from EMC to cope with the increasing amount of data, Aer Lingus is able to expand its storage capacity more quickly and at a lower price.”

Tegile’s Zebi HA2800 storage arrays leverage the performance of SSD and low cost-per-TB of high capacity disk drives to deliver five times the performance and up to 75 percent less capacity required than legacy arrays. Tegile has architected the performance benefits of SSDs throughout the data path, giving every application a performance boost. One-click virtual machine optimized storage creation can deploy hundreds of virtual machines and desktops in minutes, not hours. Built-in backup and data replication via unlimited snapshots, cloning and instantaneous restores keeps virtual machines and desktops protected.