Brad Kirby, Group Manager for HP Converged Systems, and Marian Lakov, Principal Architect – IT at United Airlines, discussed the implementation of HP OneView within the airline’s infrastructure with theCUBE host Dave Vellante, live at the HP Discover conference in Barcelona.

Lakov explained he was an enterprise architect for the technology architectures at United Airlines. “What I cover is the platform infrastructure.” data centers, hardware infrastructure, cloud, backup, SAN technologies etc.

Asked what changed in the industry in the last five to seven years, Lakov said “virtualization basically started ten years ago in the enterprise.” With today’s bandwidth and the connectivity that is out there, the cloud infrastructure has completely changed. “We started virtualizing heavily around 2008-2009” using VMware and Microsoft Hypervisor. United Airlines is now focused on building its private cloud infrastructure.

Kirby explained that 80-90 percent of the United Airlines infrastructure is virtualized. Companies, he said, don’t want to invest people’s full time and effort in being craftsmen of infrastructure, instead they should design the next service and appliance that will bring business value. “They are looking at HP to craft the infrastructure and deliver it to them,” and that is where converged infrastructure systems come into play, Kirby said.

It’s delivered on site in 20 days and it’s ready to receive workloads. “It’s ready for you to go. Then you need something to manage all that, you need converged infrastructure management. With HP OneView, we allow the system administrator to define what the infrastructure is going to look like” through a template. “They can roll that template out across their converged infrastructure,” Kirby went on.

Commenting on the OneView solutions, Kirby said “we actually redesigned it from the ground up to take advantage of the software defined approach.”

Lakov further explained that the 80-90 percent of the infrastructure that is virtualized refers to servers mostly. “We are entirely standardized on HP hardware, that’s a great thing.” Each and every cloud is individually managed, “to be able to converge the whole infrastructure, and use the templates, we were really happy with the results, we feel it’s a good fit for United Airlines.”We’re standardized all over,” because that is how you achieve stability, he added.

Kirby emphasized that United Airlines used a physical environment and virtualized environment defined into two templates and that rolls out into hundreds and hundreds of systems. “The success we see at HP OneView” is heavily based on the interaction with United Airlines.

“Right now we have OneView on 10 different enclosures,” Lakov said. “We run different versions,” ranging from beta to release version. “We are currently in a process of building a brand new data center that will host all the critical systems of the airline. This will be under OneView management.

Commenting on OneView advantages, Lakov said, “we definitely see value in the dollar savings. The biggest benefit we see from OneView is the complete transparency” and the view of the entire infrastructure. It is a very routine operation to deploy new capacity after defining and deploying the initial templates, he added.

Kirby invited companies to test drive of OneView which can be downloaded from the HP site and be used as a 60 days trial at no additional charge.