VMware has supplied solutions to AeroData to implement a software-defined data center (SDDC) and reduced costs by 50 percent.
The SDDC environment includes VMware NSX, VMware vSAN, VMware vSphere and VMware vRealize Log Insight to deliver flight data access for more than 21,000 flights in North America every day.
AeroData said the company’s SDDC environment has reduced costs by at least 50 percent by achieving efficient and effective security management, higher levels of application availability and continuity.
AeroData’s flight deck client-server application is the last application used by pilots before the aircraft entry door is closed. Five minutes of system downtime can result in more than 100 delayed flights, a significant loss of revenue, and damage to its customers’ reputations.
AeroData established data centers in three physical locations, and deployed VMware NSX as part of an active-active-active environment to have critical flight information accessible at a moment’s notice.
Advanced NSX functions enable AeroData to use all three data centers as a single pooled resource of capacity to service customer applications. NSX cross-data center capabilities allow AeroData to route customer workloads to any of the data centers, with live fail-over rather than a traditional backup / recovery business continuity environment.
“Not only do we save money by modernizing our data center environment using our existing networking hardware, but the features available through VMware NSX provide more secure and highly available design,” said Terry McDonough, president and CEO, AeroData.
AeroData chose VMware NSX as its core network virtualization platform to migrate its networking services off of hardware to NSX, including firewalling, load balancing, routing, switching, logging and monitoring.
By isolating applications within micro-segments, NSX enables east-west firewalling and has reduced AeroData’s firewall rules by more 85 percent. AeroData created and applied firewall polices from one central management window to NSX applications across all three data centers – reducing time it takes to write and manage rules in hardware appliances, achieving optimum uptime.
AeroData has adopted VMware vSAN to streamline storage management and improve application performance. VMware vSAN has reduced the effort to setup and maintain AeroData’s storage environment.
AeroData uses VMware vRealize Log Insight for centralized logging of its VMware and non-VMware environments helping it to pinpoint and troubleshoot IT issues across its sites.
AeroData developed a .NET plug-in to forward application logs from .NET applications to Log Insight and to filter them efficiently. VMware vRealize Log Insight provides content packs for various other third party applications used by AeroData — to transition from decentralized log management to a centralized log management approach.
