Server consolidation helps JetBlue soar

JetBlue Airways CIO Jeff Cohen could see a storm waiting to happen. Ever since the discount carrier launched its inaugural flight in 2000, business has been booming and the company's IT infrastructure was growing along with it.

Whenever a reservation or flight application needed more processing power, Cohen would throw more steel at it. So the company, which started with fewer than a dozen servers in a single data center, was running about 250 servers in three data centers by the end of last year, and that number was only going to increase as JetBlue continued to add flights and attract customers.

"A bell went off in my mind about six months ago," Cohen says. "I could just see that I was going to be faced with server consolidation at some point. So I thought, 'Why don't we start by taking some of our mission-critical applications and putting them on scale-up vs. scale-out servers?'"

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JetBlue Airways CIO Jeff Cohen could see a storm waiting to happen. Ever since the discount carrier launched its inaugural flight in 2000, business has been booming and the company's IT infrastructure was growing along with it.

Whenever a reservation or flight application needed more processing power, Cohen would throw more steel at it. So the company, which started with fewer than a dozen servers in a single data center, was running about 250 servers in three data centers by the end of last year, and that number was only going to increase as JetBlue continued to add flights and attract customers.

"A bell went off in my mind about six months ago," Cohen says. "I could just see that I was going to be faced with server consolidation at some point. So I thought, 'Why don't we start by taking some of our mission-critical applications and putting them on scale-up vs. scale-out servers?'"

JetBlue decided to scrap dozens of commodity servers and install Unisys' ES7000 servers, which are modular Windows-based boxes that include self-monitoring and self-healing software. Some of the ES7000s JetBlue deployed are new hybrid machines that include 32- and 64-bit processors, and PCI-blade appliances in a single box. It's all running on Windows 2003 Server Datacenter Edition.

The key for JetBlue is to keep down costs and make the most efficient use of technology, Cohen says. As a result, JetBlue isn't timid about making progressive, front-of-the-pack decisions when it comes to IT. For example, the airline's 760 reservations agents work from home on voice over IP (VoIP) phones - and have been for more than three years. All of the company's nearly 5,000 employees - JetBlue calls them crewmembers - have e-mail. All the pilots have laptop computers in the cockpit, which give them up-to-date access to airplane metrics and electronic flight manuals.

"We have a totally wireless infrastructure; we're using Gigabit Ethernet. You name it, we're out there," Cohen says. "We want to be the lead dog."

JetBlue was in the lead when it came to Microsoft. The airline made the decision early on to run its applications on commodity Compaq servers in a standard Windows environment.

"In the old days, people would say, 'Ah, a Microsoft environment. You really can't depend on them for enterprise applications; it's really only Office and the Windows thing'. . . . But Microsoft and JetBlue sort of grew up together into the enterprise business," Cohen says.

By standardizing on Microsoft, Cohen says he's saving a bundle - he wouldn't give specifics - by not having to train people on multiple platforms. JetBlue also is making use of Web services by writing applications using .Net.

"JetBlue never had to deploy Unix. It never had to deploy AS/400s. It never had to put all of these other technologies out there, which obviously cost a lot of money to run," he says.

It's those kinds of decisions that help JetBlue rise above the rest in the airline industry, Cohen says. While many of the major airlines have struggled in the past year or so, especially after the drop in travel after Sept. 11, JetBlue continues to grow. The airline, which features leather seats with free satellite TV for every passenger, reported operating revenue of $635 million for 2002, a 98% increase over the $320 million it reported a year earlier. In the first quarter this year, operating revenue jumped nearly 63% over the same quarter in 2002.