Lufthansa Systems

Story Details

Most people think of Lufthansa as an airline, but the German transportation company is also one of the world’s leading IT service providers to the airline and aviation industry. Lufthansa Systems has been successful in this niche by developing customized solutions to meet the specific needs of their client companies. The ever-increasing spread of the Internet has given the company the opportunity to develop and host online reservation services for several major airlines. Along with this opportunity, Lufthansa Systems has faced the challenge of scaling and expanding these online systems to keep pace with changing consumer demands.

In particular, the increase in online flight availability requests was putting pressure on the company’s core mainframe systems. Only about one in one thousand of the people who use the Internet to check on flight availability will actually follow up and book a reservation. However, more people than ever are shopping for flights this way. For Lufthansa Systems, the mainframe system was rapidly nearing the limits of its capacity to serve the growing number of “just looking” customers.

Lufthansa Systems considered expanding or replacing its mainframe system, but realized quickly that this would be extremely costly and potentially disruptive to its services. Instead, the company turned to Sun Microsystems for an innovative decentralized server solution that could process flight availability requests separately and in parallel to the mainframe system.

Today, the company’s mainframe handles bookings only, and Sun Fire servers now process all availability requests. Complete synchronization, which takes place at regular intervals—effectively creating a mirror between the mainframe and the flight availability database—ensures that end users receive up-to-date and accurate information. The database runs on a Sun Fire 6800 server. Applications, which are Java-based, run on 10 Sun Fire V40z systems, each equipped with four AMD Opteron processors.

The Solaris 9 Operating System provides the software foundation for the high-availability solution, enabling Lufthansa Systems to optimize hardware capacity and take advantage of the operating system’s advanced security and management features to protect customer data and reduce TCO.

To handle Lufthansa’s growing storage needs, Sun provided a highly available, scalable, flexible and easy-to-manage storage infrastructure, including modular library systems, tape libraries, disk-based storage and management software.

The Sun Services organization worked closely with Lufthansa to deploy the decentralized solution on schedule and without disruption to its services. The process of implementing the new solution was entirely transparent to end users.

Following this success, Lufthansa Systems can now apply the same decentralized model to other IT tasks it performs for its customers. Sun’s innovative but proven architecture enables this IT services leader to launch new services or upgrade existing services at minimum cost, to meet changing customer and end-user needs.