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Swamped with an ever-growing amount of data stemming from all areas of its business, Aer Lingus needed to find a scalable, cost-effective solution to supplement its existing EMC storage. The airline chose Tegile to alleviate its storage problems due to its scalability, high performance and unique combination of compression and deduplication.

EXPENSIVE EXPANSION
Aer Lingus' primary mission is to connect Ireland with the world by offering its customers the best product at a competitive price. To keep prices competitive, the airline needs to have an IT infrastructure that is cost-effective yet high-performing. However, with 58 aircraft and 11 million passengers per annum, Aer Lingus amasses a huge amount of data. This data comes from all areas of the global business - from flight reservations to air control to internal communications - and the airline faced the challenge of how to store it in an accessible, economical way.

Aer Lingus has a continuous stream of new and ongoing projects that require a strong IT infrastructure to manage them successfully. As such, there is a high level of demand on the airline's storage infrastructure as it is required to scale in order to handle and provide access to the growing volume of data. With its legacy storage solution, Aer Lingus was unable to scale at the speed necessary to cope with projects such as data warehousing and VDI deployment. For example, data warehousing creates a central repository of all the airline's data, which demands a flexible solution to cope with the data traffic during peak times. The deployment of VDI means that the airline has a consolidated, more efficient environment with the ability to access desktops remotely, but with this benefit comes the need for the IT infrastructure to scale to handle the consequent increased data load. With just the EMC solution in place, the airline had to continually invest in expensive, additional storage capacity to cope with the increasing volume of data.

Brian Price, IT Architect at Aer Lingus, outlined the reasons for exploring alternatives to the EMC solution. "As with many industries, the amount of data that we now have to deal with on a day to day basis continues to grow as we expand our services and offerings to customers. With the legacy storage, as soon as we reached our storage limit we had to go back to the vendor to buy additional storage capacity. This was both costly and an inefficient use of our IT team's time and so we went out into the market to see what solutions were available that could help us overcome these challenges."

SOLVING THE STORAGE PROBLEM
To combat its storage issues, Aer Lingus decided to deploy Tegile's 4.4TB HA2800 arrays alongside its EMC solution to keep its large server and continuous file share on the go. After conducting evaluations with various other large storage companies such as Apache and HP, the airline chose the start-up Tegile based on the high performance and cost-effective nature of its arrays. Following a successful deployment in early 2013, Aer Lingus has been able to move critical data, such as its corporate file share, to the scalable arrays, negating the need to further invest in their legacy storage. By separating its file share onto the Tegile arrays, the airline is able to fully access and store its corporate data while accommodating its increasing load more easily.

Flash is quickly becoming the latest trend for businesses but it is important not to forget the benefits that disk can still offer in terms of costs. The HA2800 offers the airline a 'hybrid solution with a twist' so that it can take advantage of both the future of flash and the capacity of disk. To explain how this is done: while all-flash, the HA2800 arrays have the industry-unique capability to turn into a hybrid solution through the addition of up to two 72TB J2800 expansion chasses. This means that the arrays can expand capacity up to 146 raw terabytes and resolve the cost to gigabyte challenge other all-flash arrays cannot address. So, with this distinctive feature, the HA2800 arrays deliver leading performance with flash but also stay within the airline's cost constraints by offering a hybrid capability.

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