United Airlines Soars with Oracle Linux
United Airlines boosts application availability, achieves zero-downtime patching, and elevates security with dynamic Linux management.
“Oracle Linux and Ksplice have been game changers for United. We’ve consolidated our IT environment, eliminated vulnerabilities, and streamlined security compliance—we can now roll out patches with zero downtime.”
Business challenges
- Optimize availability of United’s critical internal- and passenger-facing applications to ensure a superior customer experience from first contact through return trip
- Ensure business continuity as United integrated operations following its merger with Continental Airlines
- Boost IT team productivity to enable members to focus more time and resources on innovation that boosts competitive advantage and less time on routine maintenance
- Improve security compliance and streamline audit execution
- Minimize IT footprint through consolidation, including operating systems
With Oracle Linux, we found an operating system that lets us maximize the uptime of our applications. The ability to patch our kernel live with Ksplice, without a reboot, is a huge win. It also helps us meet security compliance patching requirements.
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With 4,500 flights touching down in more than 300 airports spanning five continents each day, United Airlines, its employees, and its customers are in a state of perpetual motion. To consistently ensure a superior customer experience, the company has to ensure maximum uptime for both internal- and external-facing applications.
United relies on Oracle Linux and Ksplice to optimize application availability and simplify its overall change management process, enabling it to roll out patches with zero downtime. Oracle Linux and Ksplice allowed United to boost security and service level agreement (SLA) compliance with an automated and fully documented patching regimen.
Results
- Improved application management, streamlined change management and accelerated time-to-value by adopting Oracle Linux
- Reduced IT complexity by standardizing Linux systems
- Gained the ability to roll out patches with zero downtime, ensuring high availability of critical internal- and customer-facing applications and boosting SLA compliance
- Elevated security and compliance with internal and external audits, and saved significant time with automated, dynamic, and fully-documented patching and management capabilities
- Gained the ability to patch more than 1,500 servers in a few evenings versus a few months—freeing IT team members to focus on IT initiatives that drive innovation across the airline, which had completed a large merger
- Benefitted from Oracle Linux’s 100 percent binary capability with Red Hat, which helped to strengthen relationships with and support from other software vendors