Reliability through Geo-Redundancy

Highly available Cluster Environment over 3 Data Center Locations for FLIGHTKEYS and SPACEKEYS

 

Right from the start, we provide the critical IT infrastructure for FLIGHTKEYS (international provider of flight management software). With an improved disaster recovery solution, which includes a third data center location in Düsseldorf, the originally very high availability could be increased even further.
Timewarp also relieves the FLIGHTKEYS DevOps team in 24x7 operation. This allows the team to concentrate more on application support and delivery tasks, making it easier to comply with strict SLAs and putting customer systems into operation more quickly. Fast and unbureaucratic communication and escalation channels between Timewarp and FLIGHTKEYS together with well-established and fully automatic disaster recovery processes create stable IT systems and are therefore growth drivers for the company.

 

Innovative Developer of Flight Management Software

 

FLIGHTKEYS offers a modern, web-based and individually configurable flight management and trajectory optimization system and service. This service is used by airlines and business jet operators worldwide. Their customers include smaller operators of ambulance jets, as well as holiday airlines and low-cost carriers, right up to the largest network airlines. One of FLIGHTKEYS' largest customers is a flight planning service provider that supplies around 5000 aircraft worldwide. The applications and services they provide are used 24/7/365 in the flight control centers of the customers  and form the heart of the IT landscape. The end users of the FLIGHTKEYS´ services are flight dispatchers, navigation experts, network analysts and, of course, pilots, who use it to calculate and optimize flight routes in accordance with international specifications and individual criteria.

The services have extremely high regulatory and operational requirements and must therefore run on a dynamic, high-performance and high-availability platform. They also demand a high degree of flexibility and follow the principle of "management by exception" via event-based automation.

The subsidiary SPACEKEYS offers its customers in the aviation sector precision prediction for satellite navigation and is the innovative world market leader in this area with its RAIM PRO product. The service is used by airlines as well as business operators, air traffic control centers and other providers of flight planning software and services.

 

Site Redundancy as important Component in Disaster Recovery

 

Therefore FLIGHTKEYS was looking for a partner, who could create and operate a high-available and resilient cluster.  That cluster is distributed over several data centers. As Timewarp had already looked after some of the FLIGHTKEYS systems in the past, the choice quickly fell on the Austrian provider of cloud and managed services. “Our customers work around the clock, 365 days a year. As a provider of a Mission Critical Software Service, we rely on the expertise and service of Timewarp to operate our applications with high availability and to be able to guarantee fast and unbureaucratic support at any time of the day, ”says Benjamin Rippitsch, Head of Support & Delivery at FLIGHTKEYS. The trust in the reliability of the solution as well as the experience that Timewarp offers fast support and expert knowledge in the operation of the infrastructure were further arguments for working with Timewarp.

 

Automated Disaster Recovery with less Workload

 

The IT infrastructure had to be set up in such a way that full compensation can be guaranteed in the event of a total failure of one data center. “We achieved geo-redundancy by integrating a third data center location. In addition to the two existing ones in Vienna, we integrated another one in Düsseldorf ”, says Michael Pambalk-Rieger, CEO of Timewarp. “This enables automatic failover in the event of a disaster. The solution is based on container technology, which enables dynamic allocation of VMs to root servers as well as flexible scaling of resources ”, says Michael Pambalk-Rieger about the conception of the solution.

The entire platform is fully managed and operated 24/7. It consists of 20 compute nodes, which form the vertical KVM cluster, with 800 CPU cores, approx. 15 TB RAM and 160 TB NVMe storage. The container orchestration runs on Kubernetes. Timewarp provides an independent uplink to each data center location, site-to-site VPNs to the airlines and firewall as a service.

 

Overview of the solution:

 

    • 24x7 Operation
    • 3 Data Center Locations (IXN Düsseldorf, NTT Vienna, IXN Vienna) with independent Uplinks to the Internet
    • 20 Compute Nodes Cluster stretched over 3 DC in KVM (open Source)
    • Firewall-Service
    • Site to Site VPNs (Network Connection) with Airlines
    • Leased Line between FLIGHTKEYS Office and Data Centers NTT + IXN

     

On this Platform runs FLIGHTKEYS´ Cluster Solution:

 

    • Kubernetes Orchestration
    • Docker Container
    • ELK Logging
    • Prometheus + Grafana for Performance Metric Monitoring
    • Zabbix Monitoring
    • PostgreSQL
    • RabbitMQ for Queuing
    • Backup off Site

     

"As a next step, we are planning a further expansion of the ACTIVE-ACTIVE cluster between Vienna and Düsseldorf in order to be able to meet the increasing demand from our customers for even greater location redundancy.", Benjamin Rippitsch looks to the future.

"We are noticing an increasing demand for the outsourcing of the IT infrastructure to straightened clusters across multiple data centers," says Michael Pambalk-Rieger, analyzing the trend towards location redundancy. That is why Timewarp is also planning to expand the Singapore data center location this year and expand the range to include Zurich and Frankfurt in order to better serve customer-specific requirements.

 

Do you have any questions about geo-redundancy solutions? Then please contact Mr. Michael Pambalk-Rieger, CEO & Innovation, at beratung@timewarp.at or +43 (0) 1 419 14 14 -201

 

 

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