United Airlines chose a private cloud solution using Microsoft technologies like Windows Server and System Center to consolidate infrastructure following a merger, reduce costs, and improve IT efficiency and business agility. The solutions helped United migrate its critical United.com website to a scalable private cloud with automated provisioning. United is now using Hyper-V Replica and Azure Site Recovery to automate data center migrations and provide high availability disaster recovery between its data centers.

1. United Airlines Boosts IT Efficiency, Business
Resiliency with Private Cloud Solution
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Transportation and logistics—
Air transportation services
Customer Profile
United Airlines operates one of the
world’s most comprehensive global route
networks, with more than 5,600 flights a
day to 376 airports. In 2012, United
carried more than 142 million
passengers.
Business Situation
Followingits merger with Continental
Airlines, United Airlines needed to
consolidate divergent ITinfrastructures
and define a strategic, enterprisewide IT
strategy for the future of the new airline.
Solution
United is embracing the Microsoft private
cloud, using the Windows Server
operating systemand System Center
data center solutions to virtualize its
website, provide high availability, and
migrate data centers.
Benefits
 Improves business agility, customer
service
 Reduces IT costs
 Supports business continuity
“With System Center 2012, we can automaticallymatch
computing power to website traffic. That’s IT that truly
supports the business.”
Eric Craig, Managing Director of Enterprise Architecture,United Airlines
To reduce operating costs and find more effective ways to
attract and retain customers in the hyper-competitive airline
industry, United Airlines is working with Microsoft to expand
private cloud computing to the enterprise. In 2012, the airline
chose the Windows Server operating system and Microsoft
System Center data center solutions to host and manage its
United.com website, which generates US$12 billion annually. In
2013 and 2014, United Airlines is using Windows Server 2012 R2
Hyper-V Replica and Microsoft Azure Site Recovery to expedite
the migration and consolidation of virtual machines and mission
critical services to its new data center in Chicago and provide
high availability services when hardware fails.

2. Situation
Followingits 2010 merger with Continental
Airlines, United Airlines is reaching new
levels of customer satisfaction.
Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois,the
company was rated the world’s most
admired airline on Fortune magazine’s 2012
airline-industry list of the World’s Most
Admired Companies.
Behind the accolades, the United ITteam
works to keep the underlying reservation
system, baggage-handling system, public
website, aircraft maintenance records,
database servers, and countless other
computer systems running flawlessly
around the clock. It is hard work and it
means that the IT team is constantly
looking for ways to deliver new services
faster and to streamline both its capital
outlay on servers and the operational
expenses involved in running them.
“The airline industry in incredibly
competitive,” says Eric Craig, Managing
Director of Enterprise Architecture at
United Airlines. “We have the most
comprehensive network on earth, but that’s
not enough. We have to earn our
customers’ business on each and every
flight with the great on-time performance,
excellent customer service, and innovative
features our customers want. Our IT
infrastructure needs to be reliable, cost
effective, and highly adaptive so we can
invest more capital into our customer
facing products rather than data center
servers.”
Early Virtualization Projects
In 2008, United made significant progress
in building a cost-effective, flexible, and
scalable IT infrastructure by virtualizing its
data center infrastructure. Virtualization not
only helped United to reduce IT costs but
also to improve business agility—the ability
to respond to business needs faster by
deploying virtual machines in hours rather
than weeks.
United even virtualized its business-critical
United.comwebsite and reservation
system, which was runningon physical
servers. “United.comis an incredibly
important channel for us,” Craig says.
“Between 30 and 40 percent of the airline’s
revenue comes from United.com—in excess
of [US]$10 billion annually—so it needs to
be running on a resilient, adaptive, and
scalable infrastructure.”
At around the same time prior to the
merger, Continental had virtualized about
half of its Houston infrastructure, using the
Hyper-V technology in the Windows Server
Datacenter operating system.
Merger Provides Incentive for Cloud
Computing
Followingthe 2010 merger with
Continental Airlines,United Airlines
determined that the airline should continue
along the virtualization path and adopt
private cloud computing, which
encompasses reliable, scalable, on-demand
compute, storage, and networking services
and offers point-and-click resource
provisioning for business units and self-
service provisioning for the software
development organization.
“With the automated management
capabilities of private cloud computing, we
are responding to business needs to
increase compute capabilities, or to
improve performance to minutes instead of
days,” Craig says. “The ability to move
applications fromone server to another
without disrupting your business, or to roll
back an installation when you deploy a
product that didn’t quite work out—that
kind of adaptability and manageability is a
great cost reducer and business enabler.
Private cloud computing is the only way to
get from 50 servers per administrator to
1,000 servers per administrator.”
United.comIT staff wanted to ensure its
infrastructure had the resilience, scalability,
and manageability required to boost the
airline’s competitive position in the aviation
“Our IT infrastructure
needs to be reliable, cost
effective, and highly
adaptive so we can
invest more capital into
our customer facing
products rather than
data center servers.”
Eric Craig, Managing Director of
Enterprise Architecture, United Airlines

3. industry. The IT team also wanted to have
high availability as a foundational feature of
its new data center to minimize downtime
for its business-critical systems.
“We can’t afford any service outages, so it
was important to pick the right high
availability and disaster recovery (DR)
solution: resilient, flexible, easy-to-use, and
cost-effective,” says Richard Wilson,
Principle Architect, Microsoft Private Cloud
and Windows Server at United Airlines.
“Our existing manual failover scenarios and
expensive storage arrays were from
multiple vendors and they were complex to
manage.”
At the same time, United wanted to
consolidate its data centers. It decided to
close its Houston, Texas-data center facility
and it needed an efficient, automated
method to migrate its virtualized Microsoft
infrastructure in Houston to its new, more
cost-effective data center in Chicago. Each
of these scenarios would benefit froma
cloud computing solution.
“To exploit the power of cloud computing,
we needed a partner that offered more
than just a powerful hypervisor,” says
Wilson. “We also needed a comprehensive
management tool that we could use to
manage the cloud fabric, fromthe physical
servers to the virtual machines, storage,
and networking environments.”
Solution
United Airlines is using the Windows Server
2012 operating system, including Hyper-V
virtualization technologies, as part of the
technology stack for the private cloud.
“Microsoft technologies are easy to work
with, interoperable,flexible, and cost-
effective,” says Wilson. “As such, we see the
Microsoft private cloud as a strategic
enabler to streamline our integration
efforts, and as a way to reduce the cost and
complexity of the merger.”
Microsoft System Center 2012 data center
solutions serve critical roles in United’s
private cloud strategy and work well with
other management tools. “United Airlines is
a large, technically heterogeneous and
complicated enterprise. No one tool can
provide everything we need,” says Craig.
“System Center is an important component
of our management stack, providing
orchestration, provisioning,migration, and
automated recovery services throughout a
large portion of our IT landscape. Microsoft
recognizes the management challenges of
large enterprises and has ensured that
System Center interoperates well with the
rest of our tool stack.”
Working with Microsoft
Part of the decision to choose Microsoft
technologies lies in the close working
relationship that has developed between
United and Microsoft. Before the merger,
both Continental and United had
participated in many Microsoft Rapid
Deployment and Technology Adoption
Programs. Post-merger, United joined the
Technology Adoption Programfor System
Center 2012.
“This was a great opportunity to work with
the product team and gain early access to
the features, the ability to have input and
shape what the product will look like, and
to get features that we really needed,” says
Wilson. “Over the last couple of years, we
have been extremely happy with the
support and knowledge of Microsoft
Services Consulting,which has yielded
some IT highlights post-merger.”
Migrating United.com to a Hyper-V
Private Cloud Environment
One of these highlights is a joint Microsoft
and United project to accomplish the
migration of United.comto a Hyper-V
private cloud environment. In March 2012,
with the private cloud up and running, the
United IT team pulled off what Craig calls
“one of the most complicated, massive
cutovers in transportation history”— which
included moving the business-critical
United.comwebsite froma physical server
“Over the last couple of
years, we have been
extremelyhappy with
the support and
knowledge of Microsoft
Services Consulting,
which has yielded some
IT highlights post-
merger.”
Richard Wilson, Principle Architect,
Microsoft Private Cloud and Windows
Server, United Airlines

4. environment to a Hyper-V cloud
environment.
“We did continuous systemtesting prior to
the cutover date—both scale and
functionality testing,” Craig says. “We also
worked with our business partners to
ascertain all the scenarios that were likely
to drive traffic patterns up or down during
the migration.”
As the Microsoft and United teammembers
were modeling those scenarios, they
discovered that they didn’t have enough
servers supporting United.comto respond
to worst-case scenarios. They quickly
solved this issue by taking advantage of
automated build development.
“Just two or three days before this
incredibly important event, we deployed
enough Hyper-V virtual machines to
support the site, and we did it in hours
using automated server builds and
application deployment,” says Craig.
“Physical host builds used to take days to
complete and a 30-page manual document.
We reduced this to 2.5 hours with
automation. We would not have been able
to respond in such a short time without the
private cloud technologies we had in
Windows Server 2012 and System Center
2012.”
Building a Disaster Recovery Solution
To address the need for an enterprise-
ready disaster recovery solution, in June
2013 United Airlines joined the Rapid
Deployment Program (RDP) for Windows
Server 2012 R2. “Now that we are more
virtualized, we are looking at a whole new
approach to DR, where flexibility and cloud
computing combine to provide a resilient
solution that we can tailor to meet our
needs,” says Wilson. “It made sense to
continue on our cloud journey with a
Microsoft DR solution.”
Hyper-V Replica offers a data replication
solution that replicates virtual machines
within a site or to a remote site. The latest
version of Hyper-V Replica provides the
flexibility that United is looking for, with
variable replication frequency—from30
seconds up to 15 minutes—and support for
extended replication to a third site. And the
new DR management service, Microsoft
Azure Site Recovery, answers the airline’s
need for a highly available DR solution
because it is delivered as a cloud service
running in the Microsoft Azure
environment. Azure Site Recovery offers
orchestration at scale delivered via recovery
plans, so United IT staff can bring up
applications in a desired manner at a low
recovery time objective. While Azure Site
Recovery is a feature of Windows Server
2012 R2, it supports backwards
compatibility with all versions of Hyper-V
Replica.
Enabling Data Center Migrations
During the RDP, the IT team realized it
could use Hyper-V Replica and Azure Site
Recovery for the migration of virtual
machines from Houston to Chicago. “We
were excited by this unusual use-case
scenario, which underlies the flexibility of
Microsoft technologies,” says Wilson.
“Being able to take advantage of these
technologies to migrate services sets a DR
solution fromMicrosoft apart fromother
solutions available in the market.”
In Houston, the ITteam deployed servers
running Windows Server 2012 R2 as a pre-
migration environment and installed a 1-
gigabit circuit between Houston and
Chicago for the replications. “We’ll use
Azure Site Recovery to initiate the failover
so that the virtual machines will become
live in Chicago,” says Wilson. “When we
complete the Houston migration, we’ll use
the same solution to replicate non-
production systems from our data center in
Charlotte, North Carolina, to our center in
Chicago. Then, we plan on using Hyper-V
Replica and Azure Site Recovery as a cost-
effective DR infrastructure between our
data centers.”

5. Benefits
United Airlines is using Microsoft
virtualization technologiesto streamline its
integration efforts, reducing the resources
required to consolidate its IT environment
followingthe merger. At the same time, the
company is creating an agile, responsive,
cloud-based IT environment that will help
build long-termadaptability and resilience
in the highly competitive aviation industry.
Improves Business Agility, Customer
Service
Even when it comes to the vagaries of the
global airline system, United is using
private cloud computing to accommodate
fluctuations in site traffic on United.com
and keep its customers happy. “The airline
industry must respond to unpredictable
global events in real time—natural
disasters, security threats, changes in travel
demand caused by other transportation
sectors—all sorts of things will happen all
over the earth that can send customers to
our site, and we won’t be able to predict
the traffic patterns,” says Craig. “We also
have to accommodate predictable events,
such as marketing campaigns or fare sales.
The point is, we need to scale United.com
quickly and dynamically. With System
Center 2012, we can automatically match
computing power to website traffic. That’s
IT that truly supports the business.”
The key to winning sales and driving
consumer loyalty is the ability to offer more
competitive online services for customers.
United Airlines intends to use System
Center 2012 R2 in its development
environment to improve business agility by
reducing time-to-market and introducing
competitive online services before other
airlines. “What’s the duty of an
infrastructure teamto the rest of the
business? It’s to provide a resilient, scalable,
rich, flexible infrastructure so that when the
business comes to you and says, ‘I want to
implement a brand new application,’you
can roll out those new technologies quickly,
easily, and cost-effectively,” Craig says.
Reduces IT Costs
United Airlines stands to save millions of
dollars in data center costs through private
cloud computing. Aiming for 100 percent
reliability of United.com, the company used
to buy more computing capacity than it
needed to have capacity in reserve.
However, availability through redundancy
was expensive. With cloud computing, the
cloud fabric flexes to absorb traffic bursts,
and workloads move around the cloud
dynamically to make maximum use of
resources.
Cloud computing also lowers the cost of
rolling out new services. “We had all these
physical servers, and before we deployed
anything new, we would take some of them
out of service, deploy the new application
on them, wait a couple of days to see if it
was OK, and then bring the service online,”
Craig says. “This was inefficient froma
capital allocation perspective. We needed
something less expensive and more
dynamic. Using private cloud computing is
a far smarter approach.”
The engineering teamthat is using System
Center to develop applications for
Microsoft SharePoint is saving labor, power,
and rack space costs by building out the
collaboration environment in the cloud. “To
build an eight-node cluster in cooperation
with the storage and networking teams
used to take three to five days,” says
Wilson. “Now the operations teamcan do it
all themselves in a half-day. That’s just one
small group; when this development
approach spreads across the company,
efficiencies and cost savings will increase
exponentially.”
Supports Business Continuity
Deploying the latest business continuity
solution is the airline’s most recent step
forward in its cloud computing journey with
Microsoft. United is using its new disaster
recovery solution to achieve the following
benefits:
“To build an eight-node
cluster in cooperation
with the storage and
networkingteams used
to take three to five
days. Now the
operations team can do
it all themselves in a
half-day.”
Richard Wilson, Principle Architect,
Microsoft Private Cloud and Windows
Server, United Airlines

6.  Multipurpose solution provides extra
value. While peace of mind is a
significant benefit, a DR solution can
represent a lot of IT resources sitting in
readiness on the shelf. This is not the
case with United today. “We’re using our
Microsoft DR solution to expedite a key
operational project—migrating our
Hyper-V virtualized environment from
Houston to Chicago—while reducing risk
and management overhead,” says
Wilson. “The faster we get our workloads
to run in the more efficient Chicago
facility, the faster we can start to reduce
our data center overhead.”
 Resilient disaster recovery reduces
downtime. On-premises DR software is
susceptible to the disasters that can hit a
data center. But no matter what happens
on the ground, United ITstaff can always
access their Azure Site Recovery panel
through an Internet connection.“With
Azure Site Recovery, we have an always
available management panel to enact our
DR plans as soon as possible, reducing
downtime,” says Wilson.
 Reduced costs. United had already
shipped several sophisticated storage
arrays to Houston to use for the
replication, but now it can repurpose that
investment for other purposes. “Hyper-V
Replica and Azure Site Recovery will
allow us to use lower-cost storage
platforms and still get the resiliency we
need. This solution willsave us a lot of
money,” says Wilson.
 Simplified recovery orchestration
reduces IT management. The IT team is
confident that the new high availability
and DR solution won’t be a drain on their
time. “From what we have seen, this isn’t
going to be a system that will be difficult
to set up and support,” says Wilson.
 Increased flexibility saves bandwidth.
“With flexible replication intervals, we can
reduce replication times for critical
systems, such as reservations, and save
bandwidth by allottinglonger replication
intervals to a system that isn’t used as
frequently,” says Wilson. “We are excited
to put our new solution fromMicrosoft
into production.”
Concludes Craig, “Because our industry is
so incredibly cost-sensitive, it’s essential
that we’re getting every penny’s worth of
value out of every IT asset we have in our
enterprise. We can’t waste money on spare
server capacity or data center costs. With a
Microsoft private cloud solution, we are
able to reduce our IT costs dramatically.”

7. Error! Reference source not found.
Transform the data center
The hybrid cloud from Microsoft transforms
the data center by extending existing
investments in skills and technology with
public cloud services and a common set of
management tools. With an on-premises
infrastructure connectedto the Microsoft
Azure platform, you can deliver services
faster and scale up or down quickly to meet
changing needs.
For more information about transforming
the data center, go to:
www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-
cloud/cloud-os/modern-data-center.aspx
For More Information
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For more information about United
Airlines products and services, visit the
website at:
www.united.com
This case study is for informational purposes only.
MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR
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Document published December 2013
Software and Services
 Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
− Windows Server 2012 R2
− Windows Server 2012
− Microsoft System Center 2012 SP1
− Microsoft System Center 2012 R2
 Microsoft Azure
− Microsoft Azure Site Recovery
 Microsoft Services
− Microsoft Services Consulting
 Solutions
− Microsoft Services Datacenter Services
 Technologies
− Hyper-V