Airline Management Soars with Application Acceleration

The airline business is all about avoiding crashes--both physical and network. So when SkyVantage CEO Cory T. Robin developed an innovative airline reservation and management system that runs completely over the Web, he had to make absolutely sure it was as least as reliable as the incumbent reservation system that dominates the industry.

Challenging an industry standard is bold, but perhaps even gutsier is buying a product from the company making that challenge. This is especially true in the airline business, where application downtime can disrupt ticketing and boarding procedures, scramble baggage claims and ensure that angry travelers will choose a different carrier for their next trip. But the Salt Lake City-based SkyVantage now has more than a dozen regional airline customers, and the privately held company's infrastructure provides room to grow.

"We always have a huge amount of capacity that exceeds our production needs, both to deliver five-nines availability, and if a large customer wants to sign on with us, we can say, 'Yes, we have the infrastructure already built,'" Robin says."Pinching pennies and buying the least amount of technology, and growing that as you grow" is a common characteristic of start-ups, he says. "We've taken a different approach: We purchased the technology for where we hope to be two years from now."

Application Performance Optimization Immersion Center

NEWS | REVIEWS | BLOGS | FORUMS
TUTORIALS | STRATEGY | MORE

A keystone of the infrastructure is a pair of Web application front-end (AFE) appliances from Crescendo Networks that boosted performance of the company's Apache Web servers and reduced the number of servers needed by about 60 percent. The appliances also have made it easier to manage SkyVantage's Linux-based infrastructure, especially the deployment and maintenance of SSL certificates used to secure Web transactions.

LEGACY COMPETITION

When Robin began developing the underlying software for SkyVantage in 1999, SABRE (Semi-Automated Business Research Environment), the airline reservation system originally built by American Airlines to run on an IBM 7090 mainframe, was the only game in town. A long-time airline industry veteran who has owned and operated two regional airlines--Valley Air Express, which served Las Vegas and Southern California; and RioGrand Air, which offered flights between cities in New Mexico and Texas--Robin was frustrated running a legacy product."It was an old terminal services-based 'green screen' application," he says. "I just felt I could design a better and cleaner system via a Web application."

Robin spent nearly six years researching and developing what he now calls the SkyVantage Airline Management System, which the company delivers through an application service provider model. SVAMS offers small-to-midsize airlines an all-in-one package for handling online reservations, managing flight operations, dealing with customer complaints, working with interairline baggage-claim systems and other key business processes.

Unlike SABRE, SVAMS is "completely browser-based, with no code on the client," Robin notes. "The only downloads are JavaScripts, such as Ajax and forms."

He calls SVAMS a "holistic application in that it handles everything from airline seat sales, reservations, e-commerce, call center and customer-relationship management, to actually processing passengers at the airport gate." SVAMS is also fast: It lets passengers "get their boarding passes within 12 seconds of giving the gate attendant their name, and that's unheard of in the industry."

Clear For TakeoffBy the end of 2004, Robin felt the market for his product had matured. "We did two things: We began to research how to roll out our product, and we decided to deploy only the best in technology."

On the first point, Robin says there were sufficient target airlines--small-to-midsize outfits with revenues of $10 million to several hundreds of millions a year--to make a go of it. "We're not going after the Deltas, but the JetBlues of the world," he explains.

On the latter issue, Robin studied business and delivery models of several successful online companies, including Google, and how large enterprises were deploying PeopleSoft applications. "We looked at what Web hosting providers were doing, at load balancing issues, and how their servers were interacting with database back ends."

Robin also decided to support open-source technology almost exclusively. "That closed a lot of doors for us, to be candid, and in 2004 we were a bit ahead of the game when we decided to build a solid foundation with Linux."

By "solid," he meant a three-tiered architecture that would be cost-effective to expand as customer demand increased. He researched application servers, back-end databases and network infrastructures to ensure that the system could scale linearly without having to increase costs linearly. "I wanted to be able to go from a small scale to upward of 250 servers without it costing me 40 or 50 times my original costs."At the first tier of the SkyVantage architecture are Red Hat Linux systems running the Apache Web server. An OmniPilot Lasso application server rests at the middle tier, with a MySQL-Cluster database in the back end. (Although SkyVantage owns the hardware in its Salt Lake City data center, an IT outsourcing firm, Iodynamics, manages the systems, according to Robin.)

The SVAMS software runs on Lasso, an application server that the SkyVantage CEO says will explode in the next few years. "It has its own scripting language, similar to Perl and ColdFusion, but is a lot more enterprise-scale," Robin says. "It is a true coder's language--it can take 150 lines of code and reduce it to 25."

Because SkyVantage's MySQL-Cluster database "is very complex," Robin uses a middleware product, Continuent's open-source Sequoia, to help manage the cluster. Sequoia "allows you to scale your database in a clustered environment, very much like Oracle 9i, in a master-slave environment, with nothing shared," Robin explains.

With each PC running a "holistic copy" of the database, Robin says half of his cluster could go down and he would still be in business. This five-nines capability is critical in the airline business, where downtime can cost an airline millions of dollars an hour.

Crescendo ClusterRA clustered environment is where "the Crescendo boxes really shine," Robin notes. His dual Crescendo Maestro 5080 appliances hang off a switch, inline with his Apache servers.

Robin runs both the Maestro devices in "hot mode," in a master-master environment. This ensures both maximum uptime and performance for his network.

In operation, the Maestro appliances perform four functions normally handled by a Web server: SSL encryption/decryption, load balancing of incoming traffic, compression of HTTP traffic and TCP connection management. Although off-loading all these tasks from the Web servers improves overall system performance, the boxes' ability to cache TCP connections has offered the biggest rewards.

With TCP caching--sometimes called TCP multiplexing--the multiple TCP "handshakes" that take place between a browser and a Web server are terminated and consolidated at the Maestro box rather than the server. Web servers can have "thousands of TCP connections open at any time, and this places a tremendous amount of CPU overhead on the server," Robin says.

Opening just a single connection between the Maestro and server "vastly reduces the load on a server, which doesn't have to keep opening and closing connections with the Internet," he explains. "That was a benefit we had no way of measuring, and we weren't aware of it" during the six-month pilot test of Web acceleration devices. Robin evaluated devices from F5 Networks, Foundry Networks and Citrix Systems in addition to the Crescendo appliance.Before deploying the Crescendo boxes in February 2006, Robin relied on Linux servers to handle SSL processing and load balancing. He used two of them to manage load balancing, while the Apache Web servers themselves were responsible for SSL processing and HTTP compression.

"The problem we had with that, and the reason we looked for a dedicated hardware solution, is the huge amount of CPU overhead put on the Web server when it does SSL processing and HTTP compression," Robin explains. "This is all about ROI: How am I going to get the most amount of production with the least amount of money?

"We found that if we continued deploying lots of Apache servers for SSL and compression, I would have had to buy a heck of a lot more Web servers, and servers are not cheap. Before we installed the Crescendo boxes, we figured we'd have to buy another three or four servers for each new small customer--our growth had to be linear. I would rather spend thousands of dollars on a Crescendo box to off-load that traffic and buy a significantly reduced number of servers."

Before stumbling across Crescendo by chance, Robin says his pilot tests on other Web front-end devices came up short, for several reasons. For one thing, the other devices are software-based with hard drives, which meant the possibility of hardware failures. By contrast, the Crescendo boxes are solid state, without hard drives or moving parts.

The competition also came with more bells and whistles than he planned to deploy. He calls the Foundry product a good example. "You can plug and play different cards, for different capabilities we didn't need."Simplified Management

The Maestro boxes also have simplified management of SkyVantage's SSL environment, Robin says. With the SSL user keys and certificates residing in the Maestro, he doesn't have to install one on every new server he deploys.

This would have been a major time-consuming task in July, when Robin added 100 servers to his infrastructure. In addition to installing the SSL certificate, the company would've had to test it on each machine, which would mean taking it out of service, testing it offline, putting it back online and then testing it again.

"Now, it's no big deal--the configuration on the server never changes," he adds. "This leads to excellent business continuity, because you're changing the configuration only on the Crescendo box."

Two additional benefits: With encryption terminating at the Crescendo box, traffic between it and the Web server is unsecured, and thus "extremely fast," Robin says. The Maestro appliance also keeps a record of server response times and uses that information to automatically balance network load across servers.Jim Carr is an Aptos, Calif.-based freelance business and technology writer. Contact him at [email protected].

Cory T. Robin
SkyVantage,
Salt Lake City
Robin is CEO of SkyVantage, a Salt Lake City provider of hosted airline software applications. he started SkyVantage in 1999 as an alternative to Sabre, the legacy airline reservation system, and introduced SVAMS (SkyVantage Airline Management System) in 2005.

Best part of the job: "Being able to sleep at night not worrying about whether my systems are down."

When it's no fun: "Our biggest challenge is finding passionate, expert programmers and IT guys who care as much about the company as I [do]."

Best day on the job: "When we signed our first bread-and-butter customer--when we were able to charge what we felt our product is worth.""Wish list" for company: "A cheaper, more scalable database back end."

What my clients don't know about me: "Nothing. I take my clients out to dinner and we talk about everything."

Subject that makes me rant: "Government control of the Internet."

What keeps me awake at night: "Bugs [in the SkyVantage application] is the big one."

Comfort food: "Sushi."Favorite team: "A Major League Soccer team in Salt Lake City called the Real."

Wheels: "Volvo."

In my car CD player: "Eminem. He's a crazy guy."

Must-see TV: "I like American Idol--I enjoy seeing people succeed."

Last movie watched: "Superman Returns."First career: "Unix system administrator for FedEx."

Next career: "A consultant, sitting on the beach. Or a professional ski instructor."The Hardsell

Perhaps the toughest decision for SkyVantage was whether to take on industry reservation system incumbent SABRE. Once that choice was made, the next step was to ensure airtight availability. Selecting Crescendo Network's Maestro Web front-end appliance was a "total financial decision--100 percent strictly on ROI," says Cory T. Robin, SkyVantage founder and CEO. "I put together a spreadsheet, with F5, Foundry Networks, Citrix and Crescendo."

During his pilot trials of the devices, Robin attempted to calculate the estimated reduction in servers required to meet a new customer's needs. "Most of our decision, at least on the management side, was how many servers [a front-end acceleration device] was going to reduce in our data center," he explains. Before putting the Maestro boxes through their paces, he anticipated only a 20 percent reduction based on initial tests of competitors' products. "With the Crescendo appliances, we got 60 percent. Most of that is from TCP caching.""With larger customers, it really makes a difference," Robin says. "If we would have normally needed 100 machines--and that's a conservative number we've come up with--we now need only 40 machines." This has significantly lowered SkyVantage's total cost of ownership and led to an eight-month ROI.