Feature Story

Cleared for takeoff.

Virgin Atlantic Airways migrates its databases from IBM to Sun, setting them up for improved performance, reliability, and support.

22.Nov.02--Virgin Atlantic Airways, under the direction of one of Great Britain's best-known entrepreneurs, Richard Branson, has grown in its 18 years of existence to become Britain's second-largest long-haul carrier, serving 19 destinations worldwide. By striving to continuously provide superior service at competitive prices, Virgin Atlantic has won the loyalty of its customers as well as a great many awards, including the 2001 OAG Airline of the Year award.

This year, Virgin Atlantic successfully migrated all its 90 Oracle-based databases from IBM Sequent systems to Sun Fire 6800 servers from Sun Microsystems, Inc., and in the process consolidated these from nine servers to two servers. Virgin Atlantic's move to Sun's technology was expedited by Sun Professional Services, whose services included initial architectural design and planning as well as configuration and installation.

Now that the migrations from IBM Sequent SE30 and NUMA-Q servers have been completed successfully, Virgin Atlantic enjoys vastly improved performance, capacity, scalability, and support from Oracle and third-party application developers--all at no increase in costs. Virgin Atlantic is also moving applications and databases from its IBM AS-400 and Windows NT systems to Sun systems so that all its Oracle databases will reside on Sun systems.

The Decision to Migrate

Virgin Atlantic has been just as successful as a business as it has been in becoming the choice of the flying public in England. One reason is the company's skilled use of information technology, where for seven years Oracle databases have been the basis for the firm's many internally developed and third-party applications. In the past, Virgin Atlantic ran Oracle on computers from Sequent--six Sequent SE30 servers and three Sequent NUMA-Q servers. Although these machines were originally well supported by Oracle and third-party developers, support declined in recent years.

In 2000, the degradation in support from third parties, combined with a number of other factors, inspired Virgin Atlantic to begin considering a migration from the Sequent platform. "We were experiencing difficulty getting third-party applications to run," explained Neil Perry, IT systems operations manager of Virgin Atlantic. "The majority of application developers we approached told us that Sun was their preferred platform, and that they'd be capable of providing better support on Sun."

IBM bought Sequent, but made no investment in the Sequent platforms' future. Oracle proceeded to drop the NUMA-Q from its tier one status, and then IBM announced its intentions to end-of-life the series. Fortunately, by then Virgin Atlantic was already underway with Sun.

Developing a Consolidation Plan

Virgin Atlantic began by acquiring a Sun Enterprise 450 server in late 1999 and purchasing a Sun technology-based revenue management application to replace an existing SE30 application. Two Sun Enterprise 420R servers were purchased in 2000 to run VERITAS NetBackup, and two Sun Fire 280R servers were purchased in summer 2001 to run a new flight operations system. The more Virgin Atlantic became familiar with Sun's technology, the more confident the company became that the rest of its applications could be expeditiously ported to Sun's platforms. Before commencing its wholesale migration to Sun platforms, however, Virgin Atlantic performed a very thorough evaluation of possible platforms from both IBM and Sun.

IBM encouraged Virgin Atlantic to buy its pSeries machines, but they did not fit the company's requirements. One of Virgin Atlantic's goals was to consolidate its nine server environments into much fewer, and there was not a suitable platform in the pSeries product line. The platforms offered were lacking in scalability and longevity, and IBM recommended that Virgin Atlantic plan on buying new technology servers over time rather than upgrade.

To help prepare for the consolidation, Sun Professional Services worked with Virgin Atlantic to develop a consolidation plan that encompassed an architectural design of the new system, a set of operation processes for using the system, and procedures for imparting the necessary personnel skills. Next, Sun Professional Services conducted its Performance Analysis & Capacity Planning Service, which identified quality-of-service requirements and verified that they would be satisfied by the planned architecture, operational processes, and training.

Superb Performance With No Increase in Cost

In late 2001, Sun delivered and installed Virgin Atlantic's new servers, a pair of Sun Fire 6800 servers each with 12 UltraSPARC® III 900 MHz processors and running the Solaris 8 Operating Environment. Sun Professional Services helped Virgin Atlantic set up the Sun Fire servers and partitioned each of them into two domains.

"We received very valuable direction--architecture, operational, and skill related--from Sun Professional Services," said Perry. "The consultants helped instill a disciplined project management approach that kept our consolidation objectives in purview at all times. They played a key role in architectural design."

In January 2002, Virgin Atlantic began the migration of its Oracle databases from Sequent to Sun systems. The first domain was reserved for internally developed frequent flier, customer relations, cargo, and limousine management databases; the second for third-party developed flight operations, engineering, and revenue management databases; the third for MIS reporting databases; and the fourth for development, testing, and training.

All the applications formerly resident on the SE30 and NUMA-Q servers have now been completely ported to the Sun Fire servers, which are exhibiting the superb performance and reliability Virgin Atlantic expected.

Said Perry, "We performed a total cost of ownership study that shows our migration is completely justified from a cost-effectiveness point of view. With only two highly stable platforms instead of nine old ones, our expenditure levels on support are way down. The bottom line is that with no increase in cost over what we'd have spent keeping our old machines, we've replaced outdated equipment with brand new state-of-the-art systems, with much more functionality and performance capacity, and which are far better supported by Oracle and our third-party application suppliers. We struck a fantastic deal."

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