Flying right with a Customer profile next-generation data ...docs.media.bitpipe.com/io_11x/io_111629/item_749785/Amerijet...Business Need Amerijet needed to deploy a scalable IT foundation

Business NeedAmerijet needed to deploy a scalable

IT foundation for organic business

growth and provide maximum

availability and performance for its

cargo systems and other applications.

SolutionThe company built a new converged

data center based on a Dell™

Compellent™ Storage Center SAN,

Dell PowerEdge™ blade servers

running VMware®, Dell switches

and Dell SonicWALL™ firewalls.

Benefits• 96 percent less time to close a

flight (2 minutes vs. 45 minutes),

improving customer service

• 60 percent reduction in data

center facility costs enabled

by energy efficient, virtualized

infrastructure

• Cargo inventory reports in seconds

vs. 30-40 minutes

• 10 hours to migrate entire data center

with assistance from Dell Services

• No unplanned downtime since

deployment

Solutions Featured• Data Center Consolidation

• Data Center Virtualization

• Networking

• Security

• Storage

Services• Configuration & Deployment Services

• Managed Services

• Support Services

• Training Services

Customer profile

Company Amerijet Holdings, Inc.

Industry Transportation

Country United States

Employees 1,500

Web site amerijet.com

“We can get planes in the air faster and meet more customs cutoff times for freight clearance with our new Dell infrastructure. That means people don’t have to wait an extra day to receive their shipment. For us, it means more customer service successes.” Jennifer S. Torlone, Senior Director, Technology and Information Services, Amerijet Holdings, Inc.

Flying right with a next-generation data centerAmerijet Holdings reduces the time to close flights by 96 percent, expediting freight transportation and achieving more customer service successes

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The company carries more than 200 million pounds of freight annually to over 550 destinations worldwide. With a leading presence in its primary service regions of Central and South America, Mexico and the Caribbean, Amerijet is experiencing continued global growth—but the company’s existing systems were not able to support that growth. Amerijet needed to provide maximum availability for critical applications, and had run out of space in its data center facility.

“Our worldwide cargo transportation services depend on a reliable IT infrastructure,” says Jennifer S. Torlone, senior director, technology and information services at Amerijet Holdings, Inc., Amerijet’s parent company. “We knew we needed to change our approach to technology and information services management in order to support the new product launches and extreme business growth we were expecting.”

Building a virtual foundation for growthTorlone saw an opportunity to make a fundamental shift that would turn IT into a business enabler. She outlined a three-year plan for change that included moving to a new data center facility and replacing the company’s mixed-vendor environment with an end-to-end Dell and VMware solution.

“I’ve been a Dell fan for 20 years, because I’ve seen what Dell can do for business,” she says. “The solutions are the right size and Dell ProSupport has always been wonderful. Over my career, Dell has never let me down. So it was just natural for me to choose Dell equipment for the new data center.”

Technology may have made the world smaller, but it’s still a

big place. When commercial and personal shippers need to

move cargo quickly and reliably—whether domestically or to

the farthest corners of the globe—they often turn to Amerijet

International (Amerijet).

Technology at work

Services

Dell Compellent™ Copilot Support

Dell Consulting Services

Dell Financial Services

Dell Learning System

Dell Simplified Service Desk

Dell Support Services - Dell ProSupport™ Mission Critical

Hardware

Dell Compellent Storage Center SAN

Dell PowerConnect™ M8024-k 10 switch

Dell PowerConnect M8428-k converged networking switch module

Dell PowerConnect 5548P GbE switches

Dell PowerConnect 6248 GbE switches

Dell PowerConnect 8024F 10GbE switch

Dell PowerEdge™ M620 blade servers with Intel® Xeon® processors

Dell PowerEdge M1000e modular blade enclosure

Software

Dell Compellent Data Instant Replay

Dell Compellent Data Progression

Dell Compellent Dynamic Capacity

Dell Compellent Fast Track

Dell SonicWALL E-Class NSA E5500 firewalls

Dell SonicWALL TZ 215 firewalls

Dell SonicWALL Global Management System

VMware® vSphere™ 5

“ We can offer a much more robust IT platform to the organization using VMware and Dell blades. We can keep the business moving forward.” Jennifer S. Torlone, Senior Director, Technology and Information Services, Amerijet Holdings, Inc.

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The virtual environment needed to provide maximum availability and performance for Windows Server-based workloads such as Microsoft Exchange Server and SQL Server, as well as other applications and databases including the company’s cargo management systems. To keep the physical server footprint small, Torlone chose Dell PowerEdge M620 half-height blade servers, housed in a Dell PowerEdge M1000e modular blade enclosure, running VMware vSphere.

“We can offer a much more robust IT platform to the organization using VMware and Dell blades,” she says. “We can keep the business moving forward and provide developers with testing and QA environments on demand, which makes it easier to stay up to date on software versions.”

The ability to run more than 120 virtual servers on just 14 Dell blades is also reducing costs. “You get more for your money,” says Torlone. “Based on power consumption and footprint, I was able to negotiate a much better deal on our new data center—a 60 percent reduction in data center facilities costs. And we still have space to grow.”

Dell Enterprise Consulting Services provided essential data center configuration and deployment services. “We only had 10 hours to do the actual move,” says Torlone. “We met our deployment goal, and we couldn’t have done it without assistance from Dell Services.”

Smart storage optimizes performance and utilizationTorlone knew that a scalable, high-performance storage area network (SAN) would be critical in supporting the new virtual server environment. She selected a Dell Compellent Storage Center SAN with Dell Compellent Data Progression software to automatically move data between storage tiers based on frequency of use.

“Automated tiered storage is one of the primary reasons we selected Dell Compellent,” she says. “Our big, high-transaction databases get the performance benefit of Tier 1 drives, and data that is accessed less often sits on Tier 3 drives. We then optimize performance on Tier 3 by using Dell Compellent Fast Track technology, which places the most frequently accessed data on the outer tracks of each drive for faster read access. It really works— the SAN takes care of everything, so we don’t have to constantly make decisions about how to optimize performance for certain data.”

For enhanced data protection, Amerijet uses Dell Compellent Data Instant Replay to take storage-side snapshots, which it then uploads to a cloud-based service provided by its data center partner. To conserve storage capacity, Dell Compellent Dynamic Capacity thin provisioning software consumes space only as data is written, improving storage utilization by making it unnecessary to pre-allocate large volumes. “I’m very pleased with what Dell Compellent has been able to do for us,” says Torlone. “And it’s modular—we can grow it over time.”

Dell Compellent Copilot Support provides fast and proactive service. “One of my favorite aspects of using Dell Compellent is the support,” says Torlone. “As we were moving some older Compellent equipment to the new data center to integrate with the new Dell Compellent SAN, one of the drives went bad. By the time we got it to the new data center, there was a new drive waiting for us. How can you beat that? You really can’t.”

A fast, reliable converged networkAmerijet’s old data center was limited by a 1 Gigabit Ethernet network backbone and by storage that connected to servers via separate Fibre Channel switches. In the new facility, a Dell PowerConnect 8024F rack-based switch and a Dell

“ We’ve been able to connect Amerijet’s global VPN network of 84 locations around the world using Dell SonicWALL Next Generation Firewalls. Dell SonicWALL gives us a more flexible VPN infrastructure than our previous solution.” Jennifer S. Torlone, Senior Director, Technology and Information Services, Amerijet Holdings, Inc.

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PowerConnect M8024-k blade module switch provide a 10 Gigabit Ethernet backbone, while a Dell PowerConnect M8428-k converged networking switch module allows the Dell Compellent SAN to connect directly to the Dell PowerEdge M1000e blade enclosure using the same Ethernet network.

“We upgraded our network to 10 Gigabit Ethernet with the Dell PowerConnect switches to enable an infrastructure that we can easily scale for the future,” says Torlone. “All the Dell equipment installed quickly and works seamlessly together. This gives us simplicity, reliability and speed to keep up with rapidly expanding business requirements.”

The company also uses Dell PowerConnect 6248 Gigabit Ethernet switches in the data center to provide network connectivity within the cages. “The Dell switches have redundant power supplies, and we can stack them to make it easier to administer the network and to improve overall backplane performance,” says Torlone. “As we grow, we can add switches to the stack with minimal effort. Should one switch fail, it is bypassed, and the other switches in the stack provide redundancy.”

At remote sites and its Fort Lauderdale, Florida, headquarters, Amerijet replaced consumer-level networking equipment that had “multiplied like cockroaches,”

according to Torlone, with Dell PowerConnect 5548P Gigabit Ethernet switches with Power-over-Ethernet (PoE). “We’re about to implement a new IP telephony solution, so we needed Power-over-Ethernet,” says Torlone. “We also wanted to be able to VLAN voice, video and other network traffic, which we couldn’t do with the consumer-grade gear we had. With the Dell PowerConnect 5548P switches, our network is where it needs to be to support the business.”

State-of-the-art network securityTo secure its network, Amerijet deployed two Dell SonicWALL E-Class NSA E5500 Next-Generation Firewalls in high availability. The NSA E5500 delivers high-speed deep packet inspection and application control without compromising performance. It combines tightly integrated intrusion prevention, sophisticated malware protection, and powerful application intelligence, control and visualization.

Total cost of ownership was a primary driver for replacing the company’s previous firewalls with Dell SonicWALL. “Purchasing one Dell SonicWALL NSA E5500 with licensing and two years of maintenance cost us 17 percent less than one year of support on our previous solution,” says Torlone.

Centralized management with the Dell SonicWALL Global Management System was another important factor in the decision. “Previously, our firewalls were not centrally managed, so we had to go into every single device,” she says. “With Dell SonicWALL we have centralized management, visibility into the application layer, and integrated intrusion detection and prevention, among other next-generation firewall functionalities.”

A more flexible, manageable and transparent VPNAmerijet uses a virtual private network (VPN) to connect 84 sites around the world by granting access to the company’s network and data center. To secure these locations, the company deployed Dell SonicWALL TZ 215 Series Next Generation Firewalls.

“We’ve been able to connect Amerijet’s global VPN network of 84 locations around the world using Dell SonicWALL TZ 215 Next Generation Firewalls at each site,” says Torlone. “I’m amazed that we were able to deploy 84 of them in only seven hours—and they all came up! Dell SonicWALL gives us a more flexible VPN infrastructure than our previous solution. We have visibility into our entire VPN network, which we didn’t have before, in addition to centralized management. The beauty of Dell SonicWALL and the Global Management System is that it allows us to react so quickly to business needs.”

Focusing on strategy and innovationPart of Torlone’s three-year plan is shifting the focus of Amerijet’s IT department from tactical execution to strategic thinking. To help ease the burden of end-user support, the company contracts with Dell Simplified Service Desk, a managed service offering from Dell. Recognized by Gartner as a leader in Help Desk Outsourcing, Dell currently supports over 3.5 million users and handles more than 12 million calls a year.

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“We’ve outsourced level-one support to Dell Service Desk, and it’s been fantastic for us,” says Torlone. “My philosophy is to let our best partners take care of the day to day, and Dell is my best partner. It’s really moved us into proactive mode, instead of being reactive all the time. Now I can allow my staff to be innovators, project managers, implementers and strategists.”

Meeting challenges togetherBy leasing through Dell Financial Services, Amerijet avoids up-front capital expenditures in favor of predictable, regular payments. “Leasing through Dell Financial Services has been great,” says Torlone. “We used to have multiple leasing partners around the world, and we’ve been able to consolidate all of that into one master lease with Dell Financial Services. It makes it easier to do business, and that’s our goal.”

To enhance the knowledge of IT employees and ensure that end users get the most from technology, Amerijet

uses the Dell Learning System, a cost-effective e-learning solution. “We’re going to be implementing productivity tools such as Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and I really believe in training end users,” says Torlone. “But I was concerned about what it would cost to provide training for everybody. We evaluated various e-learning options, and the Dell Learning System was one-ninth the cost of other vendors’ offerings, without sacrificing functionality. That will allow us to provide training for everyone, for less than I budgeted. That’s a good example of why every time I have a business challenge, I go to Dell. I feel that Dell knows our business and genuinely cares about what we do—and the value-add we get from that is incredible.”

Serving customers betterApplication performance and the availability of IT services have improved, and end users have noticed. “We’ve had no unplanned downtime since we

moved to the new data center, and people are doing handsprings because applications are running so much faster,” says Torlone. “Cargo inventory reports that used to take 30 to 40 minutes to run are now done in seconds, thanks to our end-to-end converged infrastructure from Dell.”

The time it takes to close a flight—confirming that all the air waybills are on the plane—and print the flight manifest (the complete list of freight on the plane) has dropped from 45 minutes to 2 minutes, a 96 percent reduction. “We can get planes in the air faster and meet more customs cutoff times for freight clearance with our new Dell infrastructure,” says Torlone. “That means people don’t have to wait an extra day to receive their shipment. For us, it means more customer service successes.”

Availability and terms of Dell Services vary by region. For more information, visit dell.com/servicedescriptions © April 2013, Dell Inc. Dell is a trademark of Dell Inc. Intel and Intel Xeon are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the United States or other countries. Microsoft, Microsoft Dynamics, SharePoint, SQL Server and Windows Server are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. Dell makes no warranties—express or implied—in this case study. Reference number: 10012129

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