Airline Soars with Blades

Jakarta-based PT Garuda Indonesia is Indonesia’s flag carrier. Recently, the airline has been challenged by competing international airlines and budget carriers as well as changing economic conditions—placing pressure on the company to maximize its efficiency and effectiveness.This case study describes how Garuda Indonesia deployed a series of high-performance Dell™ PowerEdge™ M600 blade servers with quad-core Intel® Xeon® processors in PowerEdge M1000e modular blade enclosures to help boost the efficiency of its business operations and support key front-end SAP® and Microsoft® applications. The blade servers, which connect to a set of Dell/EMC CX3-20c storage area network (SAN) arrays, have enabled the company to reduce its power consumption by as much as 40 percent and reduce its data center footprint by 50 percent—helping optimize energy use while maximizing data center performance and density. Although many servers are running in Garuda Indonesia’s data center, the company has entrusted the Dell blades with running the most critical front-end applications, including Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. The Dell OpenManage™ suite, meanwhile, helps simplify server deployment, management, and problem resolution.Garuda Indonesia has received positive feedback from users of applications that run on the blades and from the IT staff benefiting from improved ease of management. Looking ahead, Garuda Indonesia wants to further enhance its operations with new customer-facing applications and the delivery of new fleets for long-haul flights to Europe, and is confident that Dell can help them scale to meet new demands.