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Flight Options Chooses Dell Storage to Consolidate Footprint, Virtualize Enterprise Applications and Automate Management

Dépèche transmise le 8 septembre 2011 par Business Wire

Flight Options Chooses Dell Storage to Consolidate Footprint, Virtualize Enterprise Applications and Automate Management

ROUND ROCK, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Luxury jet service provider Flight Options selected Dell Fluid Data solutions from Dell Compellent to increase reliability, scalability, efficiency and automation for its virtualization efforts, as well as reduce costs and SAN management time.

After a dripping air conditioner incident left the company’s previous SAN underwater, the new SAN had to be installed and running within hours, not days or months to preserve Flight Options’ reputation for providing responsive, value-driven private jet travel choices. The Dell Copilot support and installation services deployed a new Dell Compellent SAN without interruption, benefitting the flight crews, service agents and customers.

Previously, Flight Options virtualized about half of its infrastructure and was wary of virtualizing additional applications due to the possible impact on performance. Now, all applications are virtualized on Dell Compellent, including databases, flight control applications and email servers. This virtualized IT infrastructure helps centralize and simplify management, reduce data center footprint and ultimately reduce costs. By combining automated tiered storage with disk-level virtualization, Flight Options was able to cut back from 125 physical servers to only 20, consolidate data center footprint by more than 80 percent, and reduce energy cost and space requirements while improving performance.

In addition, by using Dell Compellent capacity utilization reporting, Flight Options has been able to identify how storage is actually being deployed and used across the company. The IT team is now able to anticipate changing data needs and easily plan for future storage purchases.

Quotes:

David Davies, chief information officer for Flight Options

“We were in desperate need for a reliable SAN, and the Dell Compellent solution was the one we knew we could deploy quickly and with immediate results. In less than 20 hours it was ordered, shipped, installed and running. Through advanced features like automated tiered storage, the Dell Compellent SAN has cut the team’s management time to less than 15 minutes per week, freeing our staff to focus on other strategic initiatives. With the new SAN in place, we will be ready for just about any IT-related challenge, and opportunity.”

Darren Thomas, vice president and general manager of Dell Storage

“For fast-growing companies like Flight Options, dead-end storage growth paths, limited functionality and complex management of traditional systems are incredibly frustrating and costly. Customers need storage that will grow alongside their business without forklift upgrades, offer a robust feature set and simplify management— all of the things we’ve designed Dell Fluid Data architecture around.”

Click to tweet: Luxury jet provider Flight Options replaces underwater SAN with Dell Compellent Fluid Data Storage http://bit.ly/rlrv7i

Additional Resources:

• Dell Direct2Dell blog, Inside Enterprise IT blog and Dell Compellent’s “Around the Block” blog
• Twitter newsfeeds - @Dell_Storage, @Dell, @Compellent
• Facebook pages - Dell Storage and Dell Compellent
• David Davies’ SNW Spring 2011 presentation

About Dell

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and services that give them the power to do more. For more information, visit www.dell.com.

About Flight Options

Headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, Flight Options, LLC is the second-largest private aviation company in the United States, providing more than 1,300 owners and clients with a full suite of fractional ownership, membership and 25-hour card programs. The company operates a fleet of more than 100 aircraft including the Hawker 400XP, Embraer Phenom 300, Hawker 800XP, Citation X and Embraer Legacy 600, flying clients to most of North America, the Caribbean or Europe with as little as eight hours notice. With five FAA Diamond Award-winning maintenance centers in Las Vegas, Teterboro, West Palm Beach, Sacramento and Cleveland, Flight Options was the first fractional jet operator to receive the ARG/US Platinum Safety Rating and is the only provider to have received the rating five consecutive times. More information is available at www.flightoptions.com or by calling 877.703.2348. Like us on Facebook http://facebook.com/flightoptions, follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/flightoptions or download the Flight Options iPhone Application.

Dell and Dell Compellent are trademarks of Dell Inc. Dell disclaims any proprietary interest in the marks and names of others.