[PDF] Turkish Airlines Improves Application Performance by 50 Percent

1208_4turkish_airlines_cs.pdf

Overview

Case Study | Turkish Airlines

Overview

Industry

Airline

Challenges

·Improve performance of online applications ·Reduce IT costs

Solution

·BIG-IP ® Local Traffic

Manager

™

Benefits

·50 percent improvement in the performance of online applications ·90 percent reduction in IT management activities ·Lower costs, leading to anticipated ROI in one year

Partner

Prolink

" After offloading SSL to F5 BIG-IP LTM, our servers came to life."

Faruk Aydin, Project Manager, at Turkish Airlines

Named "Best Airline in Europe" at the 2011 World Airline Awards, Turkish Airlines provides a wide range of online services that make it easy for customers to find flights, book tickets, check in, and manage their itineraries. As use of its online services increased, the company's servers struggled to handle the traffic. Business-critical applications started to fail, and the quality of the customer experience decreased while business costs went up. When the organisation deployed solutions from F5, these vital web applications became 50 percent faster, enabling the company to significantly improve the customer experience. The F5 solution also reduced IT costs and network management time.

Business Challenges

Turkish Airlines was founded in 1933 with just

seven pilots, eight mechanics, eight officers, and a radio operator. It has since grown to become a major global brand, conveying over 31 million passengers a year to 179 international and domestic destinations.

The organisation enables its customers to

book and reserve airline tickets through its website, as well as check in, track baggage, manage bookings, check the status of flights, view timetables, and make payments. These online services need to be fast and available 24/7 to meet the

expectations and needs of passengers. As more and more customers began to take advantage of Turkish Airlines's online services, the company's servers became overloaded. Vitally important business applications started to fail, and this led to both a degradation in the customer experience and additional business costs.

"Our applications were slow and sometimes it wasn't possible to access our reservation and ticketing system," explains Faruk Aydin,

Project Manager at Turkish Airlines. "This

affected the business."

Turkish Airlines Improves Application

Performance by 50 Percent

CASE STUDY

Turkish Airlines

F5 Networks, Inc.

Corporate Headquarters

info@f5.comF5 Networks, Inc. 401 Elliott Avenue West, Seattle, WA 98119 888-882-4447 www.f5.com

F5 Networks

Asia-Pacific

apacinfo@f5.com F5 Networks Ltd.

Europe/Middle-East/Africa

emeainfo@f5.com F5 Networks

Japan K.K.

f5j-info@f5.com

©2012 F5 Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. F5, F5 Networks, the F5 logo, and IT agility. Your way., are trademarks of F5 Networks, Inc. in the U.S. and in certain other countries. Other F5 trademarks are identified

at f5.com. Any other products, services, or company names referenced herein may be trademarks of their respective owners with no endorsement or affiliation, express or implied, claimed by F5. CS02-00086 0912

Solution

To address these challenges, Turkish Airlines

decided to deploy F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic

Manager (LTM) Application Delivery

Controllers. The organisation installed three

separate BIG-IP LTM devices: the 6900, 3900, and 1600 models. Together, these devices support over 100 application servers, across two data centres.

Turkish Airlines selected BIG-IP LTM over

and above solutions from other vendors because of its ability to cope with a complex

IT environment, including a layer 3 virtual

server and virtual LAN (vLAN). Turkish

Airlines's core web applications for ticketing,

reservations, and check-in are all custom .NET and JAVA solutions. The organisation found that BIG-IP LTM was capable of supporting these bespoke applications, as well as its other core business systems, including Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft

Exchange, and Microsoft Lync.

Straight away, Turkish Airlines was able to

reduce the load on its servers by around

40 percent, by transferring SSL traffic to

the BIG-IP LTM devices. It was also able to compress its data by 70 percent, significantly reducing its bandwidth requirements.

This had an immediate impact on the

performance of the company's servers. "After offloading SSL to F5 BIG-IP LTM, our servers came to life," says Aydin.

Turkish Airlines takes advantage of F5's

flexible programming language, iRules ® , to help it address a range of complex issues that it had previously struggled to resolve.

For example, the organisation uses iRules for

client caching, redirections, authentication, and request and response manipulation. It also uses iRules to redirect HTTP to HTTPS to increase the security level for its web services. Use of BIG-IP LTM strengthens the

company's security in general and helps it to achieve compliance with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS).

Benefits

Following the deployment of BIG-IP LTM,

application response times increased by an impressive 50 percent. In addition, 3.5 seconds were shaved off the time required for the organisation's main website to load. These application performance improvements enable Turkish Airlines to deliver a high level of service to over 1 million registered users of its online services.

In 2011, Turkish Airlines was named "Best

Airline in Europe" at the World Airline

Awards. This accolade was awarded

to Turkish Airlines following feedback from 18.8 million airline customers who participated in a customer survey. Turkish

Airlines's success is, of course, the result

of a great many factors, but the strong performance of the company's online services is likely to have had a positive impact on customer perceptions.

In the company's IT department, the

deployment of BIG-IP LTM has reduced the amount of network management time required by 90 percent, and the IT team can encrypt around 200 percent more traffic. "BIG-IP LTM has freed up the IT department and has given us much more time for other

projects," Aydin says.Use of BIG-IP LTM has helped the company to reduce costs, too. Turkish Airlines has reduced its Internet and leased line costs and no longer has to upgrade its servers or buy additional servers in the immediate future. Commenting on these financial savings, Aydin says, "While we cannot calculate the exact time period, we expect to achieve return on our investment in F5 solutions in approximately one year."

" BIG-IP LTM has freed up the IT department and has given us much more time for other projects."