LES ULIS, France, Jan. 14 — HP today announced that Air France has automated and increased the reliability of its 1,500 Linux servers by deploying a private cloud solution based on HP Cloud Service Automation (CSA) software to accelerate deployment times for physical and virtual infrastructures.

Air France operates 1,500 flights daily in France and across the world. Together with KLM, Air France is part of one of the leading European air transport groups, offering customers access to a network covering 230 destinations in 113 countries from hubs at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport and Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. In addition, KLM and Air France, along with partners Delta and Alitalia, operate Europe’s biggest transatlantic joint venture, with more than 250 flights daily.

With between 350 and 500 installations and reinstallations annually, Air France’s Linux server farm is growing rapidly. In light of the resource costs incurred by these installations, and the increasing convergence between Air France and KLM, it became necessary to standardize on a single tool to automate the deployment of operating systems, middleware, monitoring tools and capacity management. The HP solution, which paid for itself within a year, significantly reduced the time it was taking to bring environments into service while improving quality and reducing operational costs.

“Since automating our installation processes, we have gone from around six days for installing a server cluster to one day and, instead of more than 24 hours, it now takes less than 15 minutes to install one virtual machine,” said Patrick Bourel, head of Open Systems, Air France. “This scalable platform will allow Air France to put in place monitoring and audit tools in order to achieve better quality of service.”

After a validation phase with HP Operations Orchestration and HP Server Automation software, which reduced the cost of infrastructure provisioning by 85 percent, Air France created a private cloud with HP Cloud Service Automation (CSA) software and put the solution into production. In the space of 12 months, 90 percent of installation processes were automated. HP CSA’s self-service portal gives project managers secure access to installation services and automatic server provisioning, reducing delivery time and eliminating human error.

This private cloud, enriched by the integration of a range of application environments, will be progressively extended to other groups of users who want to access an expanding catalogue of cloud services. The next phase of the project consists of automating the deployment of application environments and increasing the functionalities of the platform with DevOps functions for a community of 500 to 600 developers.

“Businesses are increasingly interested in cloud solutions that can improve flexibility, enable new business processes and increase efficiency,” said Jean-Marc Defaut, director, Cloud, HP France. “HP software helps Air France achieve its business objectives, now and in the future.”

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Source: HP