Alaska Airlines Uses Infrastructure Automation to Stay on Top

The Alaska Airlines IT organization believes infrastructure automation with UCS Director has been one of their keys to keeping their end-users happy and achieving a #1 rating for customer satisfaction*.

Delivering Infrastructure On-Demand

Applications and IT infrastructure are critical to the success of any airlines. Alaska Airlines has focused on automating their infrastructure resources, so they can ensure they achieve their business goals. This enables them to meet the high customer expectations they have established as an organization, achieving the J.D. Powers award for highest customer satisfaction the past 11 years in a row.

Micah Ravet and Michael Wolcott are infrastructure engineers at Alaska Airlines. They developed an infrastructure on-demand solution using UCS Director and VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) It is a 100% hands free solution that provisions additional server and storage resources automatically. The solution they created auto scales on-premises virtualized infrastructure in response to user requirements, so IT can keep pace with the speed of business.

Seamless Cloud Experience

Alaska Airlines uses Cisco UCS Director to deliver private cloud. As Michael and Micah explained in this video, they wanted to provide a seamless experience for their consumers “…whether they were deploying on-prem or into the public cloud they don’t notice a difference in terms of availability or performance.”

The focus of the solution they developed is the accessibility, speed, and reliability of VMware ESXi host provisioning, using Cisco UCS and the VMware hypervisor. The key to this solution is the software-defined nature of Cisco UCS hardware. The software components include Cisco UCS Director, UCS Central Software, VMware vSphere, and vROps. They implemented a step-by-step automated process that is summarized in the image below.

Michael and Micah wanted to share the solution they developed with other IT organizations, so they can realize similar benefits from infrastructure automation. They have worked with Cisco and VMware to develop a white paper describing how to implement their infrastructure on demand solution.

You can download the white paper here.

For additional information go to the UCS Director web page.

* Alaska Airlines was recognized by J.D. Powers as Highest in Customer Satisfaction Among Traditional Carriers in North America for the 11th year in a row