Case Study: Pillar Data Furthers Skyline Airlines' Green Initiatives

Skyservice Airlines is a dynamic aviation enterprise servicing the needs of Canadian travelers. Skyservice is Canada's number one requested airline in the charter industry, with customers including tour operators, corporations, professional sport teams, governments, relief agencies, and travel incentive companies. The airline is widely recognized for its quality service and the versatility of its charter operations. Quality, safety, respect, and efficiency are the core values that guide Skyservice's staff every day and help build their reputation as leaders in aviation services and as Canada's premier commercial charter airline.

Running a successful charter airline generates a significant amount of data, including data for fleet management and bookings, international customs security requirements, document encryption, and regulations and certifications.

In 2008, Skyservice was looking to expand its data center and began to implement a VMware environment. It was then that they identified some issues with their data center: NAS storage with isolated arrays, multiple points of potential failure, an ineffective disaster-recovery policy, and storage that was inefficient to cool and required a substantial amount of power. Furthermore, the non-centralized NetApp system they had in place was difficult for the IT staff to maintain, making efforts to scale both complex and costly - not to mention hampering their VMware deployment.

After looking at a range of storage products, Skyservice purchased the Pillar Axiom 600. Their new system would be easy to consolidate with the existing NetApp system while adding 10TB to their storage pool. Its modular design meant that future scaling of capacity could be done easily and without downtime, and it had a simple graphical user interface that would make it easy to maintain. A final, important consideration was that the Pillar Axiom was the only system that met the company's rigorous efficiency policies.