Eurocontrol climbs into the private cloud

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Founded in 1960, Eurocontrol is an intergovernmental air traffic management organization funded by 39 European member states and employing around 2,500 people. Eurocontrol manages the Maastricht Upper Area Control Centre (MUAC). In turn, MUAC’s 700 employees provide upper airspace air traffic control services for over 1.5 million flights above north-west Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg each year – making it the second busiest control center in Europe.

Demand for airspace takes off
Eurocontrol MUAC wanted to meet the challenge of maintaining safe, secure and cost-effective air traffic control (ATC) services in an increasingly busy airspace. To continue to achieve these goals as flight volumes increase, the organization uses business support applications to provide the necessary information to optimally manage ATC operations. To ensure 24/7 availability for these applications, Eurocontrol MUAC took the decision to migrate them to a private cloud environment.

As Huub Meertens, Head of Support Engineering Section at Eurocontrol, explains: “We rely on our IT systems to keep track of thousands of aircraft each day. Without these systems, we would be unable to achieve the high-levels of safety, performance and traffic fluidity that our civil and military partners require. Put simply: no technology – no air traffic control.

“Just as we use technology to design optimal utilization models for our airspace, we rely on our business support applications to manage the human workload on the ground. These applications ensure that we always have the appropriate number of qualified people to operate our ATC systems.”

Exploding data
In the past, Eurocontrol MUAC utilized a distributed server infrastructure to develop business support applications. As the air traffic volumes in MUAC’s airspace grew, the amount of data the organization collected and utilized was exploding – and its landscape expanded to more than 1,000 servers to keep pace.

“The amount of application server provisioning requests jumped up each month, and we expect the figure to continue rising,” says Huub Meertens. “This resulted in the need for more datacenter floor space, network connections and maintenance contracts, as well as more procedures to administer an increasingly sprawling landscape. It was becoming more and more difficult to keep our servers under control.”

In addition to the manpower challenges for managing such a large physical environment, Eurocontrol MUAC’s distributed business support platform complicated the task of developing new applications.

“Our old one-app-per-server environment was expensive to cool and maintain, and made provisioning of new services difficult,” says Huub Meertens. “It would take up to two months to get a new physical application server set up. To free our developers to innovate, we needed to offer them a stable, secure and highly flexible platform for agile application development.”

Cloud on the horizon
To define the goals and parameters of its new solution, Eurocontrol MUAC created an architectural working group that evaluated a number of solutions according to reliability and performance, serviceability and scalability, and total cost of ownership (TCO), including maintenance effort and license costs.

This working group determined that virtualization on a heterogeneous private cloud platform was the most effective means of consolidating its server landscape and decreasing server provisioning times.

Kumar Sivakumaran, Advanced Middleware Engineer at Eurocontrol, comments: “We wanted a single platform capable of supporting all of the Linux environments used by our developers. Many of our applications are extremely CPU-intensive, so it was important that the new solution could be optimized for each application’s individual requirements.”

Testing IBM against the rest
A Eurocontrol engineering team visited the IBM test laboratory in Böblingen, Germany, to test the IBM offering against its competitors.

“Of all the technologies we investigated, the IBM zEnterprise hybrid solution came out on top,” says Kumar Sivakumaran. “zEnterprise offered the combination of flexibility, high-performance and rock-solid reliability we needed. In more than 40 years of using System z® at Eurocontrol, we’ve never experienced a single outage – so our confidence in the platform was already extremely high.”

Eurocontrol engaged IBM to implement an IBM zEnterprise 196 mainframe with the IBM zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension (zBX). Currently, the z196 has four active Integrated Facility for Linux (ILF) processors, and five IBM x86 blades and one IBM Power blade are installed in the zBX.

Working with Eurocontrol’s engineers, the IBM team configured the central processor complex of the zEnterprise 196 with IBM zEnterprise Unified Resource Manager software and IBM z/VM virtualization technology. The resulting ensemble allows virtual servers on the zBX to be managed alongside mainframe system resources from a single console interface.

Eurocontrol’s engineers then began the process of migrating ATC applications from individual distributed servers to virtual Linux instances on the IBM z196 or IBM System x blades in the zBX, according to the organization’s fit-for-purpose policy.

“Today, we have more than 60 virtual application servers up and running on the zEnterprise ensemble, with many more to come,” says Kumar Sivakumaran. “The support of the IBM team was invaluable throughout the project – especially in the planning stages. Whenever issues arose, we could also contact IBM lab experts directly to get the answers we needed. Their professionalism helped to ensure that the implementation was completed as expected.”

Lightning-speed provisioning
With the help of its IBM solution, Eurocontrol MUAC has achieved its goal of creating a cloud-based development and server platform for its business support applications.

“Before we implemented the new solution, it took us weeks to manually install new application servers,” says Huub Meertens. “Thanks to the zEnsemble, we use one interface to orchestrate a virtualized pool of resources, enabling us to create new application servers in minutes – not weeks. Because of that, less effort is needed to perform deployment and maintenance tasks, and our developers are able to roll out innovative new applications, faster.

“In fact, we improved our overall planning efficiency for operations from 65 percent in 2006 to 85 percent in 2011, and we predict further improvements in 2012.”

Cutting administrative workloads in half
Using the IBM zEnterprise, Eurocontrol MUAC has consolidated its server landscape for business support applications to a server environment managed through a single point of control. By reducing the manual effort required to maintain the environment, Eurocontrol’s private cloud solution has enabled the organization to make significant operational cost savings on hardware maintenance, software licenses, asset management and surrounding infrastructure such as network cabling.

“Our private cloud has a number of advantages over our old distributed platform,” continues Huub Meertens. “We can now manage both our x86 and System z environments from a single platform, which has shrunk our datacenter footprint by 80 percent, reduced energy consumption by 58 percent, and cut our administrative workload by 50 percent.”

In addition, the ability to virtualize the provisioning of new servers has helped Eurocontrol MUAC to avoid the high costs associated with manual orchestration and installation of physical server resources.

Continually decreasing TCO
Huub Meertens comments: “The more servers we virtualize, the more our TCO decreases. Thanks to the reliability, flexibility and simplicity of management of our zEnterprise private cloud solution, we spend 43 percent less effort maintaining our infrastructure than before.”

Building on the success of its IBM cloud platform, Eurocontrol is seeking to accelerate application development by increasing the automation of its provisioning systems.

Looking to the future
“Our new goal is to create an online Platform-as-a-Service catalogue, with options for preinstalled middleware and database software,” concludes Huub Meertens. “By continuing our strong collaboration with IBM, we want to give our developers the ability to create their own virtual application servers at the touch of a button – empowering them to deliver even greater value to our air traffic control staff, and, indirectly, to the passengers and pilots.”

Smarter Computing: The IT Infrastructure of a Smarter Planet
Using thousands of hours of operational data, the business support application development team at Eurocontrol MUAC creates software that enables ATC staff to improve the experiences of passengers and pilots. These applications provide the information required to increase the efficiency of ATC operations by optimizing airspace design and the allocation of the workforce needed to manage and control it. To manage many terabytes of data, Eurocontrol deployed a virtualized Storage Area Network with Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM). Virtualization is achieved with the IBM System Storage® SAN Volume Controller, which helps to create pools of managed disks spanning multiple storage subsystems. These managed disks can then be mapped to virtual disks used by server applications, helping to maximize existing storage resources and simplify management. The multi-tier storage system includes IBM DS8000, DS4700, Storwize® disks and an IBM TS3584 tape library – providing rapid, reliable access for the team’s analytics and development applications. Business support applications driving the Management Information System are run in virtual environments optimally configured for their individual requirements, with the most critical applications benefiting from the exceptional performance and rock-solid reliability of the IBM zEnterprise 196. IBM zEnterprise Unified Resource Manager allows all resources to be managed from the same intuitive interface – cutting the IT department’s maintenance workload by 43 percent.