Zinopy provides seamless performance for Ryanair

Zinopy, one of Ireland’s leading IT solutions and services providers, has announced today it provides Ryanair, one of Europe’s largest airlines, with Citrix NetScaler® technology which allows the organisation to deliver a seamless performance for Ryanair.com and its associated bookings engine bookryanair.com. The sites, which are critical to the Ryanair business, together experience 50 million page views and 1.2 million unique users each day and bring between 98 and 99 per cent of Ryanair’s sales.

Citrix NetScaler® technology also enables Ryanair to effortlessly manage traffic spikes which are a direct result of promotions run by the company.

Having used Citrix NetScaler® technology for the past eight years, Ryanair has refreshed the hardware three times over this period in order to deliver constant, reliable and resilient performance to the sites, which need to be able to handle the very high volumes of traffic. “In the mornings, we have a high look-versus-book ratio. Then in the evenings, from 7 o’clock to 10 o’clock, we have very high bookings,” explains Declan Costello, Head of Infrastructure at Ryanair and responsible for the network, server, storage and data centre systems that run the company’s website and head office. “Monday and Tuesday evenings are particularly busy. The business also has irregular spikes in web traffic whenever it runs promotions.”

Zinopy has highly expert skills in web and cloud technologies and has been working closely with Ryanair for a number of years, supplying the company with the six NetScalers it’s currently running as high-availability pairs in each of the website’s data centres. Ryanair also uses Citrix NetScaler for testing at its head office and has activated the Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) functionality to manage traffic between data centres and seamlessly move traffic from one data centre to another when required.

Ryanair has seen many benefits at a result of the recent Citrix NetScaler technology upgrade. The more dynamic load-balancing, configured so that each data centre can handle the site’s full load but traffic can be shared or balanced across all three, is now able to effortlessly manage traffic spikes which are a direct result of promotions run by the company. “We had the single biggest day on our website for seat sales and our infrastructure was fine. Our servers were fine, the load balancing was fine and we had capacity to spare,” says Declan.

The solution also allows Ryanair to fully support the organisation’s agile marketing by providing fast response to business requests for website support, such as creating dedicated webpage address or re-directing an existing address to coincide with marketing promotions, a task that would have previously taken two or three hours of developers’ time but now takes just twenty minutes.

The dynamic deployment of the NetScaler technology allows updates to be made in an agile fashion, with no site downtime. As Declan explains, NetScaler allows Ryanair to do more with less: “Without NetScaler customers would not be able to book on our website. Without putting NetScaler technology between the customer and the web servers, the servers would not be able to manage the load. We would need far more web servers to cope.”

Aidan McAvoy, Sales Director, Zinopy Ltd highlights: “Ryanair is one of the most dynamic and progressive exponents of business technology adoption in Ireland including Citrix NetScaler. Zinopy is proud of its association with such a forward-thinking organisation”.

Pictured above are Declan Costello, Ryanair; Graham Frazer, Citrix; Aidan McEvoy, Zinopy; James Morgan, Citrix.

The provision of secure mobile workspace solutions and services is one of Zinopy’s key strategic growth initiatives, and the company works closely with Citrix to bring major virtualisation benefits such as reduced costs, improved business continuity and increased business agility to organisations across Ireland.