Flight Option Chooses Dell

Luxury jet service provider Flight Options LLC selected Dell Fluid Data
solutions from Dell Compellent to increase reliability, scalability, efficiency
and automation for its virtualization efforts, as well as reduce costs and SAN
management time.

After a dripping air conditioner incident left the company’s
previous SAN underwater, the new SAN had to be installed and running within
hours, not days or months to preserve Flight Options’s reputation for providing
responsive, value-driven private jet travel choices. The Dell Copilot support
and installation services deployed a Dell Compellent SAN without
interruption, benefiting the flight crews, service agents and customers.

Previously, Flight Options virtualized about half of its
infrastructure and was wary of virtualizing additional applications due to the
possible impact on performance. Now, all applications are virtualized on Dell
Compellent, including databases, flight control applications and email servers.
This virtualized IT infrastructure helps centralize and simplify management,
reduce data center footprint and ultimately reduce costs. By combining
automated tiered storage with disk-level virtualization, Flight Options was
able to cut back from 125 physical servers to 20, consolidate data center
footprint by more than 80 percent, and reduce energy cost and space
requirements while improving performance.

In addition, by using Dell Compellent capacity utilization
reporting, Flight Options has been able to identify how storage is actually
being deployed and used across the company. The IT team is now able to
anticipate changing data needs and easily plan for future storage purchases.

David Davies, chief information officer for Flight Options said: "We were in desperate need for a reliable SAN, and the Dell
Compellent solution was the one we knew we could deploy quickly and with
immediate results. In less than 20 hours it was ordered, shipped, installed and
running. Through advanced features like automated tiered storage, the Dell
Compellent SAN has cut the team’s management time to less than 15 minutes per
week, freeing our staff to focus on other strategic initiatives. With the new
SAN in place, we will be ready for just about any IT-related challenge, and
opportunity."

Darren Thomas, vice president and general manager of Dell
Storage said: "For fast-growing companies like Flight Options, dead-end
storage growth paths, limited functionality and complex management of
traditional systems are incredibly frustrating and costly. Customers need
storage that will grow alongside their business without forklift upgrades,
offer a robust feature set and simplify management all of the things we’ve designed
Dell Fluid Data architecture around."