Spanair, one of the largest air carriers in Spain, has selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the platform of choice for several of its most important recent IT initiatives.

Spanair is utilizing Red Hat Enterprise Linux in two of the company's major projects. The airline is running its Carmen crew optimizer software, providing the airline with settings for crew managing, fleet scheduling and timetables, on three Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers. The Red Hat platform is also used in several of the airline's optimization stations that receive information provided by the central server to execute a number of processes. Additionally, Spanair runs its Oracle 10g R2 database server on HP Proliant servers on Red Hat Enterprise Linux to host its data warehouse.

"When we began considering Linux within our infrastructure, we were looking for solutions for two main concerns: cost reduction and performance improvement," said Joan Pons, Spanair systems manager. "Currently, Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers on an Intel platform provide good performance when connected to modern fibre channel drive arrays HP Eva 4000.  We are assessing the possibility of increasing the number of Linux servers in order to install other Oracle databases and new applications."

Spanair has achieved significant cost savings with Red Hat solutions and through the Red Hat subscription model. With its use of Red Hat Network for support and updates, it has reduced the time and resources spent maintaining its systems. The company has drastically reduced both hardware and software costs and has enjoyed great flexibility in tweaking its own solution and avoiding vendor lock-in.