Gulf Air, the national carrier of the Kingdom of Bahrain, has created a private cloud IT environment with Red Hat solutions encompassing 200 servers running more than 100 core applications and holds more than 50 terabytes of data.
The airline deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP), and Red Hat Storage as the platform for its innovative big data solution and Gulf Air developed a sentiment analysis solution based on big data technologies that is capable of addressing social media posts in both Arabic and English for Arabic Sentiment Analysis.
The solution is based on an open source Hadoop big data framework running across a server cluster in Gulf Air’s private cloud environment and using Red Hat products including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss EAP, and Red Hat Storage.
Dr. Jassim Haji, director of information technology at Gulf Air said, “As an airline, it is crucial to know what our customers are thinking. We want to know who is satisfied with Gulf Air’s service, who is not and why, and what Gulf Air can do to improve its services to passengers. The big data solution deployed is an open source one, which meant no special license fees to pay, while the infrastructure where it runs is based on our existing open source-based cloud environment and virtual servers, which meant no hardware investment was required.”
The scalability that Gulf Air achieves in this environment with Red Hat solutions provides sufficient capacity to host the big data solution, which in turn helped Gulf Air avoid additional infrastructure investment including hardware expenditure.
Ranga Rangachari, vice president and general manager, Storage and Big Data at Red Hat said, “Gulf Air is a fantastic example of a global customer that is solving business challenges and embracing the potential of big data with open source solutions and Red Hat. Using open, software-defined storage as the basis of their big data platform and private cloud offers Gulf Air a more cost-effective, scalable, and flexible environment that can meet their existing and future needs. We’re thrilled to collaborate with them to enable their big data success.”
