Spirit Airlines Opts for Nutanix

Nutanix, Inc. announced that Spirit Airlines, Inc. has selected Nutanix as the infrastructure platform of choice for its next-generation datacenter.

With Nutanix supporting mission-critical applications, including its flight operations software, Spirit achieved record IT performance during the 2015-2016 holiday season, recording zero issues during this peak period.

Spirit is an ultra-low cost carrier in the US, relying heavily on enterprise applications to operate more than 400 daily flights to 56 destinations. The company’s traditional, legacy architecture was resulting in procurement inefficiencies and scaling issues, and was in need of a resilient system that could run corporate applications. It also needed to simplify its complex infrastructure stack.

Nutanix’s Enterprise Cloud delivers agility, resiliency and integrated management with consumer-grade design to support critical plane maintenance workstations and run SABRE Flight Operations Systems software in Spirit’s corporate operation control center. Spirit can run and deploy applications natively on Nutanix in a virtualized environment.

Through simplifying their infrastructure stack with Nutanix, the company was able to integrate their entire datacenter and utilize VMware and Nutanix HCI with Cisco ACI. The internal IT teams were able to deploy and manage multiple projects, while learning VMware skillsets at the same time, as they were deploying and running critical business applications with Nutanix.

“To maintain our market-leading position in the ultra-low cost sector, we needed to upgrade to next-generation infrastructure that our team could quickly deploy and manage,” said Hilton Sturisky, CIO, Spirit Airlines, “Nutanix emerged as the solution to make this possible, and the company’s excellent customer service made this a seamless transition. We’re proud that our investment in Nutanix contributed to a company milestone by enabling us to experience no IT issues for the first time during our peak travel window from November to January. Deploying enterprise infrastructure via a converged model we could fractionally consume was the best investment in time and money we could have spent. With more traditional architecture, we would have been forced to purchase large models that are unpredictable, and end up taking more time and money to manage.“

Spirit expects to move all production workloads to the Nutanix platform following its migration to a Terremark datacenter in Miami in June 2016. It has targeted to utilize the Nutanix AHV by early 2017 for its future DR plans in converging its environment.

“We’re pleased to provide Spirit Airlines a competitive advantage in the airline community,” said David Sangster, EVP operations, Nutanix. “With hundreds of flights per day, Spirit runs a highly demanding operation. Only Nutanix provides the datacenter infrastructure to power their critical business applications with flexibility, scalability and performance.“