Copa Airlines

Latin-American Airline Cuts Costs, Gains High Availability with Virtualization Solution

Copa Airlines is an international air carrier based in Panama that is well known for its customer service. Copa deployed a virtualization solution using Windows Server® 2008 withHyper-V™, and Microsoft® System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, saving in hardware costs and gaining high-availability for key applications.

Business Needs

Copa Airlines is a leading airline based in Latin America, with a fleet of 40 aircraft. It operates 136 daily flights to 42 destinations in 22 countries in North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean. For the second quarter of 2008, Copa Airlines reported an on-time performance of 89.3 percent.

Copa is known for its award-winning customer service; it utilizes advanced IT tools to help serve its customers. The airline has been hosting two legacy applications on a single server: Web services that interact with finance and accounting systems and a Crystal Reports application, essential for optimizing aircraft loads, capacity, and on-time performance. On another server, Microsoft Dynamics® GP, formerly known as Microsoft® Business Solutions–Great Plains, manages the resources, including meals, loaded onto the aircraft. Two other servers host a BlackBerry Enterprise Server and Microsoft Project Server 2002.

While the existing infrastructure has been performing well, Copa is always looking to improve server availability and efficiency. “We wanted to bring high availability to these applications to ensure we continue to provide quality customer service and efficient operations for passengers,” says Rimsky Sucre, CIO at Copa Airlines. “We also wanted to reduce data center costs and make room for important projects.”

Copa had three Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 host servers in production environment for its Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) solution, which was hosted in an outsourced data center. “We knew virtualization would reduce server sprawl and provide a scenario for increased availability. The plan was to virtualize and consolidate four servers in our data center and host them in a high-availability environment,” says Alex Tarte, Release and Services Administrator at Copa Airlines, who led the project.

 

Solution

Copa Airlines chose a Windows Server® 2008 Hyper-V™ virtualization solution. “We were attracted to the value of Microsoft’s integrated data center virtualization, which is based on Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008,” says Tarte. 

We were attracted to the value of Microsoft’s integrated data center virtualization, which is based on Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. Rimsky Sucre CIO Copa Airlines

Copa Airlines joined a Microsoft Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) to test Hyper-V, the built-in virtualization solution with the Windows Server 2008 operating system, to provide a dynamic and reliable virtualization environment. The IT team at Copa worked with its Microsoft account representatives to execute a pilot project for the RDP. To begin, Copa had already picked the four servers at head office’s data center and the three PKI servers at the outsourced data center. The company purchased two HP BL460 dual-core blade servers with Intel VT processors and implemented a two-node cluster, taking advantage of the new clustering features, quick migration, and failover capabilities in Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V.

“We used System Center Virtual Machine Manager for the physical to virtual conversions of the chosen servers,” says Tarte.

“We virtualized to a local, temporary server running Hyper-V. Then we put the virtual machines on a removable disk and drove to our data center,” Tarte continues. “We deployed all virtual machines on one node of the cluster, and we are in the process of migrating the PKI solution to the Hyper-V environment.”

 

Benefits

Copa Airlines used Hyper-V technology to solve several business issues at once. The RDP program proved that a Microsoft virtualization solution could be a cost-effective way for Copa to increase business application availability, reduce data center costs, and optimize data center management. Windows Server 2008 and its integrated hypervisor-based virtualization technology enabled Copa to virtualize servers and legacy applications and consolidate them as virtual machines in a high-availability environment to ensure continued quality customer service.

Increase Availability of Business Applications.  “While we couldn’t justify the cost of deploying a high-availability solution for individual servers, it was easy to justify two servers in a Hyper-V cluster when they provide redundancy for seven virtual machines,” says Tarte. “Hyper-V improved availability for business solutions that help us keep our services well provisioned in a high availability environment.”

Reduce Data Center Costs. Copa gained a high-availability solution for business applications, saving the expense of purchasing and managing replacement servers and improving server utilization rates from 10 percent to 75 percent. “We saved a considerable amount of money by not having to replace those four servers and acquiring three new servers for the PKI infrastructure,” says Tarte. “Savings will increase as we continue to virtualize other servers at headquarters. We have room for up to 10 virtual machines on each node of our Hyper-V cluster, and we’ll be reducing our server hosting costs.”

Optimize Data Center Management. “In a test conducted during the RDP, we found that the System Center Virtual Machine Manager physical to virtual process was seamless and easy,” said Tarte. Using the Quick Migration feature in Hyper-V, Copa’s IT team moved virtual machines between nodes in 20 seconds. IT also used System Center Virtual Machine Manager to create virtual machines in a high-availability environment in one 30-minute step, as opposed to three manual steps that take hours. “Now we can dynamically load balance virtual workloads and monitor and report on our growing virtualized environment,” concludes Tarte.