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For Lufthansa Systems, Customizing In-Flight Connectivity and Entertainment Systems for Its Award-winning BoardConnect Solution Depends on Stateful Containers
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
- Discrete Manufacturing
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Fleet Management
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Lufthansa Systems, a subsidiary of Europe’s largest airline, provides IT services to the airline industry. Its BoardConnect product powers in-flight entertainment and connectivity for millions of airline passengers. The product requires a robust and scalable IT infrastructure that can meet customer demands for flexibility, robustness, modularity, and ease of use. As the company increasingly built its infrastructure around microservices and containerization, it identified a missing link – data persistence. The company needed a solution that would allow data persistence to catch up to the flexibility, ease of use, and speed that they needed to achieve in a containerized environment. The company also needed a solution that would allow it to auto-instantiate CMS environments on developer-committed projects and manage customers’ individual CMS production instances.
About The Customer
Lufthansa Systems is a subsidiary of Europe’s largest airline, Lufthansa. The company is one of the world’s leading providers of IT services in the airline industry. It offers its more than 300 airline customers an extensive range of successful and, in many cases, market-leading products covering all of an airline’s business processes – in the cockpit, in the cabin, and on the ground. Lufthansa Systems’ BoardConnect product powers in-flight entertainment, infotainment, and connectivity for millions of airline passengers. The product is designed with microservices in mind, and it runs in Docker Swarm environments with Consul-backed service discovery. The company maintains a large number of services that persist to regular block storage.
The Solution
Lufthansa Systems found Portworx PX-Enterprise to be a natural fit for its demands. The solution is free of cloud, use case, and vendor constraints, and is fast and transparent for traditional, cloud native, and third-party applications. Portworx PX-Enterprise allows Lufthansa Systems to spawn full-blown CMS environments in a matter of minutes, without requiring manual intervention. For production, it allows operations to move CMS environments around in the cluster, and the corresponding data follows along transparently. The solution operates transparently in the background, and administrative tasks are easy to execute through the provided Lighthouse UI, or CLI when necessary. Upgrades are straightforward, and metrics from the storage subsystem are available in a standard JSON format.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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