Airline plays a hunch: WestJet's William Lee helps keep fares low by using an intelligent application delivery appliance for WAN traffic over an MPLS network

Communications News, July, 2008 by William Lee

Growth is good, but WestJet airlines found that growing was beginning to threaten its low fares-based business model. Faced with a costly upgrade for its WAN services enterprise-wide, the airline's manager of technical infrastructure had a hunch there must be a better, more cost-effective alternative. He was right.

WestJet is a Canadian low-cost airline offering scheduled service throughout its 47-city North American and Caribbean network. Named Canada's most admired corporate culture in 2005, 2006 and 2007, WestJet pioneered low-cost flying in Canada.

The airline has grown rapidly since 1996 when it commenced flight operations with 220 employees and three planes serving three destinations. WestJet now has more than 7,000 employees, and operates a fleet of 74 next-generation Boeing 737s that serve 47 destinations in Canada, the United States and the Bahamas.

By beginning its operations on a small scale, WestJet was able to control costs throughout the company, and the IT department was no exception. For its first full decade in business, the airline was able to employ a cost effective Frame Relay network service to link its data center with the growing number of hubs and terminals.

In 2006, William Lee, WestJet's manager of technical infrastructure, recognized the need to manage WAN bandwidth more effectively. "The Frame Relay network served our needs quite well for quite a while," he says. "But as we grew and added a redundant data center, the network became too complex and costly."

Which is why Lee decided to replace the company's Frame Relay network with a multiprotocol layer switching (MPLS) service.

With its support for multiple classes of service in a secure, point-to-multipoint topology, MPLS seemed to be the ideal solution for WestJet's growing number of users and applications. Of particular importance was the service-level agreement (SLA) guaranteeing uptime for WestJet's mission-critical applications. A problem with MPLS, however, is that the more granular the service gets as the primary means to map and manage traffic, the more expensive it becomes.

ASSIGNING PRIORITIES

WestJet's situation is fairly typical of many distributed businesses. All 7,000 employees are either occasional or regular users of the WestJet network, which is centralized at redundant data centers in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The online reservation system is the most mission-critical of WestJet's networked applications, and this would need to be assigned the top priority, regardless of how bandwidth is managed.

The company also had numerous other applications, including e-mail, fleet maintenance, accounting and Internet access. In addition, WestJet wanted to implement voice-over-IP (VoIP) communications as yet another cost-saving measure.

Lee had a hunch there had to be an alternative that was both more capable and less expensive than MPLS-based traffic management. "Vendors always promise great results if you use their products or services," he observes, "and some of these claims are true. But all too often, unfortunately, many are exaggerated. So when I heard about systems that offered intelligent bandwidth management resulting in superior application performance and an extraordinarily high return on investment, I was more than a little skeptical."

Nevertheless, Lee decided to check out such claims, but rather than merely accepting the vendor's promises for results, or those of third-party testing labs or vetted lists of customer references, Lee attended a trade show.

Before attending the show, he did his homework, checking out several vendors providing intelligent bandwidth management, WAN optimization or application delivery solutions. He arrived at the show prepared with a short list of systems and a longer list of specific, probing questions. He wanted to know if these systems really worked, if they were easy to use and deploy, if they really improved application performance and overall bandwidth utilization, and if they were really a good investment. He wanted the bad news, too, being sure to ask about any problems or pitfalls.

One of the products on Lee's short list of systems was the PacketShaper from Packeteer. With such a widely used solution, Lee was able to locate enough PacketShaper users to get answers to all his questions. "These users all rated the product very highly for its comprehensive application visibility, sophisticated bandwidth-management capabilities, cost-effectiveness and ease of use," Lee recalls.

Lee remained skeptical, however, about the product's ability to meet WestJet's driving need to keep WAN bandwidth costs at a minimum. Specifically, Lee needed to accommodate the additional growth that had occurred since converting to the MPLS service, without increasing the bandwidth of any link to any site, especially at the data centers, and without incurring additional service fees for any special mapping or provisioning within the MPLS infrastructure.

Packeteer offered to let Lee conduct testing with a demonstration system. The trial involved a single PacketShaper at the primary data center that was used to gain better visibility into all the applications running on the network, and to manage bandwidth utilization more effectively with the appliance's traffic-shaping feature.