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China-based aviation IT solutions company TravelSky renewed its three-year commitment to Unisys' private cloud solution to begin its second phase of cloud computing strategy.

TravelSky operates reservations and departure control systems used by China's air carriers. It also maintains a global distribution system for travel agencies in China.

TravelSky's deployed the release 1.2 of the Unisys Secure Private Cloud Solution to help meet demand spikes in its transaction loads in the air transportation industry.

The three-year renewal, signed in December 2011, covers the second phase of a private cloud computing strategy that began in 2010. The contract includes software, services, and provisioning and maintenance for four Unisys ES7000 model 7600R G3 enterprise servers.

TravelSky's first phase of the private cloud implementation involved the building of a test and development environment using release 1.4 of the Unisys Secure Private Cloud Solution.

Rong Gang, TravelSky's vice president, said: "We have used the Unisys private cloud management software in our test and development environment, to gain the flexible operational benefits of cloud computing within the security of our own data center. Now we are ready to apply it to a core production system. The Unisys solution provides highly automated operations and self-service provisioning of IT resources as needed so that we can quickly meet fluctuating business demand."

In the second phase of the rollout, TravelSky will create a production private cloud environment based on release 2.1 of Unisys Secure Private Cloud Solution. This release features a new dashboard capability that gives administrators a single, integrated view of all cloud resources. The enhanced dashboard capability streamlines management of critical IT infrastructure and helps reduce overhead costs by making it easier to commission and decommission resources as needed.

The TravelSky production cloud will connect travel agencies and reservation systems via the Unisys Open Message Switching Engine (OMSE), a communications front end that allows travel agencies, airline reservation offices and external systems to communicate with the mission-critical TravelSky systems.

TravelSky also plans to use the enhanced user interface and automation capabilities of Unisys Secure Private Cloud Solution release 2.1 to customize the private cloud to offer the OMSE Gateway as software-as-a-service (SaaS) to its partners and agents. 

In addition, TravelSky aims to reduce its data center requirements and operational costs by migrating the OMSE onto a virtualized environment running on a Unisys ES7000 Model 7600R G3 Enterprise Server that can consolidate up to 24 virtual servers onto a single machine.

"TravelSky's business involves many critical processes spanning the passenger, cargo, airline and airport aviation business, so they need a highly secure, scalable, and flexible IT infrastructure to meet changing demands in logistics, passenger services and other core applications," said Sue Carter, vice president, technology consulting and integration solutions, Unisys Asia Pacific.

"The Unisys Secure Private Cloud Solution supports this by delivering the same attributes as a public cloud except from within TravelSky's own data center, providing cost-efficient access to 'just in time' resources that can be shared among user communities in a common infrastructure model, but remain secure and isolated from each other," Carter added.