Aer Lingus prepares for VDI takeoff with Tegile

Peter Gothard hears why the airline decided to eschew its old technology partner EMC and instead underpin its virtualisation and big data strategies with storage from Tegile

Aer Lingus’s 48 aircraft carry about 11 million customers a year on 116 routes. The national flag carrier of Ireland operates in a highly competitive market, so it is constantly looking to get as much bang for its buck as possible. For CTO Ravi Simhambhatla, this pressure to keep costs down led him to stop investing in further EMC storage solutions, and instead supplement the loadout with technology from Tegile.

“It came down to three words: price/performance ratio,” says Simhambhatla. “We have IBM in-house, we have EMC in-house, but when I look at long-time viability in terms of performance ratio, they simply don’t match Tegile.”

Simhambhatla has spent about £330,000 on an 80TB Zebi HA2800 storage array, and is using this to support an entire virtual infrastructure.

“We’ve got corporate file shares, 80 virtual machines, we’re replacing 1,400 desktops with virtual desktops, and all the storage is going to be residing with Tegile,” says Simhambhatla.

“And we’re going to start migrating Microsoft Exchange across the Tegile environment as well,” he adds.

Simhambhatla says Tegile’s proprietary compression method is paying dividends.

“The performance is fantastic,” he says.

“We implemented our VDI strategy in quarter one of 2013 – migrating away from desktop and laptop environments. We would not have done it unless we were absolutely sure of the Tegile performance.

“My guys are very impressed with the compression. When we moved the corporate fileshare to the Tegile from the EMC systems, we’d taken 4.7TB, which translated to 1.7TB on the Tegile, because of the level of compression.

“The speed of compression and decompression in the Flash is not even perceptible. So when we moved the fileshares, nobody in the company knew.”

Tegile president of EMEA Paul Silver puts the compression level down to the firm’s “secret sauce” – the way its solutions deal with the metadata layer.

“It’s usually a big overhead on the IO, and that’s why other vendors have not been able to [match our layer of compression]; because they can’t figure out the duplication over the hard disk – but we took the metadata off the hard disk, and put it on its own dedicated solid state drive. That drive’s mirrored and copied for resilience. And so it’s in one place, instantly available, and is very fast,” he explains.

Aer Lingus prepares for VDI takeoff with Tegile

Peter Gothard hears why the airline decided to eschew its old technology partner EMC and instead underpin its virtualisation and big data strategies with storage from Tegile

Tegile calls the technology MASS – Metadata Accelerated Storage System. By writing only to unique data blocks and having them reside in a cache, the system can then store a larger working set of data in Tegile’s eMLC-based [Enterprise MLC – an enterprise-grade Flash memory with more write cycles than the consumer variety cache]. Originally based on Sun Microsystems’ combined file system, ZFS, Silver calls the Tegile software system a “forked off thread”, named ZebiOS.

With ground staff now utilising the extra storage and data crunch to wander around planes with iOS mobile devices for diagnostics, and more big data collection planned, Simhambhatla says there are now “no plans to expand EMC real estate”, and carry on with Tegile for the foreseeable future.

“On a cost-benefit ratio, for us, we make £1.2bn revenue a year,” says Simhambhatla. “So we need to find the right-size partners who are the right size for us to go to. EMC and IBM are great companies, but it's also about the consultation and the software you're buying into. They’re right for United Airlines – who have 5,800 departures a day, compared to around 200 for us. That’s the scale we’re talking about.”

Simhambhatla intends to “trap all data” in future, with around 40TB still available on the Tegile system, and Oracle’s Airline Data Model product, and IBM’s WebSphere, to stuff it all into.

“This database is going to get very large very quick, with 250 systems generating a tremendous amount of data. Our goal is to grab every bit of data we can get our hands on. Whether or not we understand the value of it today is immaterial to us. We want to go back and have data scientists apply their super-hot brains to figure out what we do next.”

While one may be pushed to refer to Aer Lingus as an SMB, it’s encouraging to see a smaller vendor and customer enjoying such mutual business benefits. The HPs and EMCs of this world had better watch out as smaller and agile new providers are increasingly harnessing the power of dynamic storage solutions in focused areas.