GLASGOW, Scotland, October 31, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Europe’s cheap flights specialist uses fully virtualised private cloud
iomart Hosting, one of the UK’s leading cloud computing and managed hosting providers, has taken Skyscanner, Europe’s leading travel search website, into the cloud to support its objective of becoming the number one flight search engine in the world.
Skyscanner specialises in cheap flights and deals on over 600 airlines, as well as prices for car hire and hotels. Visits to the Skyscanner website have increased year on year to the point where over 14 million people use it every month. To cope with this huge demand, Skyscanner needed cloud hosting backed by the most powerful servers. It turned to iomart Hosting.
Craig Parker, Director of IT at Skyscanner, explains: “It’s vital that the Skyscanner flight search engine is always available because people are accessing it from many different countries at all times of the day and night. iomart Hosting’s support has allowed us to scale up as fast as possible, while still allowing us to serve our millions of customers in a professional, responsive and personal manner.”
iomart Hosting supports the entire global portfolio of Skyscanner domains, which range from Spanish (Skyscanner.es) to Japanese (Skyscanner.jp) and Korean (Skyscanner.kr). This is all housed in a private cloud, backed by an enterprise grade SAN solution.
Phil Dalbeck, Infrastructure Architect at Skyscanner, explains: “Migrating from a traditional physical infrastructure platform to a fully virtualised private cloud provides the business agility Skyscanner needs to support our exceptional growth. Capacity planning is no longer the headache it once was, and the business can now expect to see additional server resources deployed within minutes rather than weeks.”
The iomart Hosting team helped Skyscanner’s technical team deploy a cutting-edge VMware installation, with powerful custom built servers providing N+1 resilience and high performance. The database layer comprises a number of Fusion-IO equipped SQL Servers delivering previously unattainable I/O performance.”
Phil Dalbeck adds: “Our move to FusionIO completely redefined the capabilities of our presentation database systems. Working with a hosting partner prepared to work with us in deploying such cutting-edge technology is vital to our success.”
Sarah Haran, managing director of iomart Hosting, says: “Skyscanner demanded high performance and availability plus the ability to react quickly to market demands by the provision of additional resources. iomart Hosting provided consultation and benchmarking services, procured cutting edge hardware which we installed in our fully-owned high-spec data centres, ensuring that Skyscanner and its millions of customers get the best service possible.”
