British Airways has chosen to deploy Red Hat's Enterprise virtualization technology as part of improvements being made to its IT infrastructure and future plans for an internal Cloud.

The UK-based airline said it had to expand its IT infrastructure to keep up with company growth and additional business requirements for its production environment which supports its external website.

It said due to the shift in airline ticket buying patterns the website often supports in excess of 450,000 visitors per day.

British Airways said its new IT infrastructure will be more cost-effective than proprietary virtualization.

Since deploying it, Red Hat, it claims to have reaped several important benefits in areas such as administration and ongoing efficiency for developers at the company.

British Airways said it has deployed 750 virtual machines on 130 physical hosts across two data centers, replacing a previously virtualized estate.

British Airways’ UNIX and Linux infrastructure consultant Richard Dawson said a highly scalable solution is “critical” and this advantage means it doesn’t need to over-commit on its IT plans.

“As an operation that functions 365 days a year with a plane always in the sky, high availability is key for the safety of our operation and ultimately our customers. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization now enables us to have a single-pane view as to what is going on in the whole environment which we didn’t have before,” Dawson said.