Flying high with network-attached storage: in moving from direct-attached to network-attached storage, Continental Airlines has found high availability, a flexible storage infrastructure and backup times that have been reduced from days to hours. (Case Study).

Enterprise Systems Journal, November, 2001 by Robb, Drew

For Continental Airlines' Houston-based Planning, Pricing and Scheduling Division, high availability is vital. Some 12 Oracle databases receive data on schedules, numbers of passengers per flight, total numbers flying per day, as well as pricing information on every flight from every competitor. This information is stored and analyzed to model and generate globally distributed schedules and pricing plans.

"Using a direct-attached storage architecture with a SCSI high-speed interface, we were only able to do a cold backup every Saturday," says Vinod Kaila, Manager of Unix Network Operations at Continental. "By switching to a network-attached storage architecture, we perform a complete backup each night, and it takes us about five minutes per database compared to...

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