EasyJet’s head of application architecture Paul Curtis is a member of the Windows Live Special Interest Group and an active member of the Microsoft Architecture Council.

He has recently started to consider making a more strategic investment in Microsoft technologies, and after testing the community technology preview of Windows Server 2008 earlier this year, now plans to use the system to support a subset of EasyJet’s core business functions.

EasyJet is planning to roll out Windows Server 2008 across its web servers in summer this year, comprising a total of two web server farms of 16 systems each. The servers perform about 200,000 booking transactions per day at peak volumes, with more than 35 million page impressions per month.

Curtis expects about a 20 per cent increase in performance over Windows Server 2003 on the test servers, but has seen no changes to security either way as EasyJet’s applications already run in a hosted environment.

“The driver for us is to do all the other cool web-based things, such as using the Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax)-based user interface, Windows Live platform and the Silverlight portal to use streamed video and identity authentication that lets us access information on other systems,” he says.

“The other reason is that moving to an Active Server Pages (ASP.Net) environment makes it easier for us to configure applications using IIS 7.0. It makes the whole enterprise a lot easier to manage.”

Most of EasyJet’s revenue comes from selling ancillary products added to flights. It is therefore important that the airline has a reliable web services architecture that is able to process transactions through partner providers, such as hotels and car parks ­ something that Windows Server 2008 supports, says Curtis.

“We are building a .Net 3.5 architecture and migrating from the classic ASP application to build a services platform that enables us to communicate with our external partners, such as global distribution companies like Galileo and Amadeus for corporate travel bookings,” he says.

But EasyJet has no intention of migrating its entire server base to Windows Server 2008 and Curtis is well aware that using the new system makes sense only in certain environments.

“We run a mixture of Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2000 across the rest of the business,” he says. “We would have to look at whether Windows Server 2008 offers any benefits to those environments. The financial systems are all on separate servers, for instance, and we have about 160 servers in all our
environments.”