Veeam lands deal to back up airline's virtualised estate

Low-cost carrier Flybe has virtualised 75 per cent of its estate

Low-cost airline Flybe has deployed Veeam backup and replication software across the virtualised part of its infrastructure.

Flybe began rolling out VMware virtualisation technology across the 50 per cent of its server infrastructure that hosts the www.flybe.com e-commerce web site in March last year, and has now gone on to virtualise about 75 per cent of its total infrastructure.

The carrier opted for VMware version 3.5 initially, but has now upgraded to 4.1. Initially, Flybe used agent-based backup and restore systems to manage the newly virtualised infrastructure.

These were the same backup and restore technologies it had used prior to virtualisation, namely HP data protector agents and Symantec backup agents, but Flybe found that the systems were not scalable and used up valuable processing power.

In addition, tracking and recovering individual files if something was lost was difficult as the individual agent had to be pinpointed.

Also, as with traditional physical backups, there was no guarantee that a backup server was fully recovered as this would mean testing the hundreds of daily virtual backups.

Veeam manages file backups centrally, meaning recovering individual files is more straightforward, and the solution is based on its own server, which means it does not use up processing power. It also automatically tests the daily virtual backups.

James Richards, virtualisation and server specialist at Flybe, explained that the technology would save the company money by saving time.

"Once configured the system requires very little day-to-day maintainance. For example, the Sure Back Up feature automatically verifies a backup for you: this would have been done manually in the past."

Flybe is half way through virtualising the remaining 50 per cent of its IT infrastructure, comprising internal applications and services, and Richards anticipates that the process will be completed by March.