British Airways RHEVs up private cloud

British Airways (BA) has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) on its private cloud infrastructure.

British Airways, the flag carrier airline of the UK and the biggest in the country, felt it needed to expand its IT infrastructure to support additional business requirements for its Linux-based production environments, particularly that of its website, BA.com.

The company said it chose Red Hat’s offering as it was the best product for its workloads, both in terms of functionality and value, as well as allowing it to avoid vendor lock-in due to its open source nature.

Thus far, BA has used RHEV to deploy 750 virtual machines on 130 physical hosts across two datacentres. This replaces a pre-existing virtualised estate.

Richard Dawson, a UNIX and Linux infrastructure consultant at BA, said: “We use Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to create our own cloud so that developers can use it to build their own virtual machines and control environments as they wish.

“We have used Red Hat solutions in various parts of our business for ten years, and we are pleased to continue our long-standing relationship by deploying Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.”

Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager of virtualization and OpenStack at Red Hat, added: “Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization offers a no-compromise virtualization solution for Linux.

“We’re delighted about the successful deployment and value British Airways is deriving from Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as well as the opportunity to offer our services across Consulting, Technical Account Management and Support for faster time to solution.”