Hawaiian Airlines Windows Azure Migration
Hawaiian Airlines Moves Reservations System to the Cloud for Reliability, Scalability and to Cut Costs
Hawaiian Airlines' business depends on the availability of their website and online reservations system. Hawaiian Airlines successfully mirrored their on-premise web reservations systems in Windows Azure and as a result cut the cost and complexity of their disaster recovery site while increasing scalability.
Situation
With 20 destinations in over 6 countries, Hawaiian Airline's needs its’ online reservations system to be available to customers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. A diverse and complex system is required to support airline reservations. Historically, Hawaiian Airlines online reservations system was hosted on dedicated, on-premise, infrastructure.
Concerns About Availability
Hawaiian Airline's used a world class data center and cutting edge equipment to host their on-premise solution. However, they knew that disaster could still strike at any time. City wide power failures, internet backbone disruptions and wide-scale hardware failure could still take their business down instantly if their on-premise datacenter faced a disaster.
Severely Limited Scalability
Hawaiian Airlines’ site traffic patterns can vary by as much as 10x depending on the time of day and ongoing promotions. However, scaling on-premise infrastructure was a slow process and could not expand to meet customer demand as needed, which resulted in a slow site during popular promotions and lost customer revenue.
Skyrocketing Hosting Costs
The hosting costs associated with a dedicated on-premise hosting infrastructure were constantly growing. To support peak customer traffic during popular promotions, Hawaiian Airlines hosting footprint needed to be at least 10x larger than their day to day traffic patterns.
High IT Operations Overhead
In addition to disaster recovery concerns, the Hawaiian Airlines IT staff spent a considerable amount of time configuring and maintaining the on-premise systems. A large, complex enterprise systems footprint required extensive OS configuration, patch management, networking, hardware resource monitoring and real time operations support.
Development Staff Spending Too Much Time on Deployments
The Hawaiian Airlines web development staff required an ever growing staff to support deployment of the various systems to support online reservations. With an expanding infrastructure footprint to support scalability and on-premise failover, the development team found they were spending more time handling Production deployments and configuration than they were developing new features.
Disaster Recovery Could Multiply Overhead and Reduce Staff Effectiveness
To ensure availability of its online reservations system, Hawaiian Airlines needed to mirror its' systems in a geographically isolated disaster recovery location. However, creating another on-premise mirror of their current systems in a different geographic location would be extremely expensive.
Solution
Hawaiian Airlines worked with Techmana Hawaii staff to evaluate many possible solutions, including on-premise hosting and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions. The only solution that solved all of Hawaiian Airline's problems was Windows Azure.
Moving a large complex system to Windows Azure's Platform as a Service (PaaS) architecture required technical planning. Hawaiian Airlines and Techmana Hawaii staff partnered with Microsoft to address these challenges and leverage Windows Azure services to support its online reservations system in the cloud.
Benefits
By moving its disaster recovery site to Windows Azure, Hawaiian Airlines has significantly cut IT costs, provided dynamic scalability, reduced hosting administration for its staff and increased global reliability for its customers.
Lowers IT Costs
Windows Azure PaaS architecture significantly cut the hosting costs associated with providing a disaster recovery site by allowing Hawaiian Airlines to run a small ongoing footprint and scale when needed.
Provides Scalability
Windows Azure’s ability to scale instantly to meet any traffic demand empowered Hawaiian Airlines to run promotions with confidence, knowing that the online reservations system could scale to meet peak demand.
Improves Staff Productivity
The Windows Azure PaaS architecture freed Hawaiian Airlines development staff from complex and time consuming infrastructure setup, maintenance and deployments, allowing them to focus on core business needs.
Increases Global Reliability
By running their online reservations system in Windows Azure, Hawaiian Airlines is now confident about their ability to serve customers in the event of an IT disaster.
Solution Overview
Organization Size 5000 employees
Key Contributors
Jeffery Hong
CEO – Techmana Hawaii
Project architect, relationship manager, global coordination
Aaron Schnieder
Managing Agent – Techmana Hawaii
Technical architect, Hawaiian Airlines staff liaison
David Osborne
CIO – Hawaiian Airlines
Hawaiian Airlines initiative sponsor
Microsoft Consulting Services
Technical architecture, development
Hawaiian Airlines Customer Applications Staff
Requirements, project management, development
Organization Profile
Hawaiian Airlines was incorporated on January 30, 1929 under the name Inter-Island Airways Ltd. Hawaiian Airlines carries an average 8 million customers a year and serves 20 domestic and international destinations in the Pacific region.
Business Situation
Hawaiian Airlines wanted a cost effective and scalable disaster recovery site to ensure reservations remained available in the event of a catastrophic failure in their main data center.
Solution
To take advantage of the efficiency, cost, and reliability benefits of the cloud, Hawaiian Airlines mirrored its reservations system from on-premises systems to Windows Azure.
Benefits
- Lowers IT costs—now and long-term
- Improves IT staff productivity
- Increases performance and reliability
- Provides scalability during peak traffic periods
Software and Services
- Windows Azure
- SQL Azure
- Windows Azure CDN
- Windows Azure AppFabric Cache
Vertical Industries
Airlines