Hawaiian Airlines, Rackspace reach managed hosting deal

06.06.2006
Hawaiian Airlines Inc. has signed a managed hosting deal with Rackspace Ltd. in which the San Antonio-based company would manage the Honolulu-based airline's public and e-commerce Web sites.

Hawaiian Airlines has already migrated its Windows-based hosting environment from a collocation facility to Rackspace's data center to take advantage of the hosting provider's expertise in application availability and business continuity, the companies said in a statement. The companies signed a multimillion-dollar, multiyear deal but declined to be specific on details.

Throughout the airline's migration to Rackspace's data center, the Intensive Hosting support team provided daily migration consulting and support to ensure a smooth relocation. With nearly 30 servers and devices arranged in a clustered environment, Hawaiian Airlines is using Rackspace to keep its online reservation system running around the clock, according to the statement.

"Rackspace's really key differentiator is a very focused managed hosting service," said Kevin Kekoa, manager of operations and systems engineering at Hawaiian Airlines. "They only do one thing -- they provide a fully hosted managed service for high-end Windows environments and Linux environments, and that was an exact fit for us because most of our architecture is all .Net, and we have a couple of Linux machines as specialized gateways into the Sabre reservation system. So it was a best fit for us."

Rackspace's Intensive Hosting for the Microsoft platofrm provides Hawaiian Airlines with a fully managed hosting system using advanced custom monitoring services, managed security, intrusion detection, performance-enhancing gear, managed backup, managed storage and advanced SQL Server database services, the companies said. The system went live April 10, Kekoa said.

"Equipment has broken already, but they are just absolutely on top of contacting us and letting us know," he said. "Everything is redundant, so even though there has been a drive failure or a CPU failure, we just fail over to the other side so there is no interruption in service."