Gardner: We have heard a lot about IT as a service. How have you at Southwest been able to  keep IT squarely in the role of enablement?

Young: As we are taking a look and trying to be what travelers want in an    airline, and we are constantly looking for ways to improve Southwest    Airlines and make it better for our customers, that's really where virtualization and IT as a service comes into play.

People want to be able to get on Southwest.com,   make a reservation, log on to their Rapid Rewards or our Loyalty   Program, and they  want to be able to do it when they want to do it, when   they need to  do it, from wherever they are. And it’s just great to be   able to  provide that service.

We provide that to them at any   point in  time that they want in a reliable manner. And that's really   what it  gets right down to -- to make the functions and the solutions   that we  provide ubiquitous so people don’t really need to think about   anything  other than, "I need to do this and I can do it now."

At your fingertips

Gardner: I travel quite a bit and it seems to me that things have changed a lot  in the last few years.   One of the nice things is that information  seems to be at your   fingertips more than ever. I never seem to be out  of the loop now as a   traveler. I can find out changes probably as  quickly as the folks at the   gate.

So how has this transfer of  information been possible?  How  have you been able to keep up with the  demands and the expectations  of  the travelers?

Young: If we talk about information and the  flow of  information through  applications and services, it really starts  to  segment the core  technical aspects of that so the customer and our   employees don’t  really need to think about it. When they want to get  the  flight at the  gates, the passenger is on a flight leg, etc., they  can  go ahead and  get that at any moment in time.

... The same is true   of how we provide IT as a  service. What we want to be able to do is   provide IT whenever they  want it, whenever they need it, at the right   cost point, and to meet  their needs. We've got some of the best   customers in the world and  they like to do things for themselves. We   want to allow them to do  that for themselves and be able to provide our   employees the same.

Gardner: How in  IT have you been able to create common infrastructures,  reduce   redundancy, and then yet still ramp up to meet all your  requirements?

Significant volume

Young: What   we've been able to do and how we have been able to meet some  of those   challenges is through a number of different VMware products.  One of the   core products is VMware itself, if we talk about vSphere, vMotion, etc., to be able to provide that virtualization. You can get a 1-to-10 virtualization depending on which type of servers and blades you're using, which helps us on the infrastructure side of the house   to  maintain that and have the storage, physical, and electrical   capacity  in our data centers.

But it also allows us, as we're moving, consolidating, and expanding these different data centers, to be able to move that virtual machine (VM) seamlessly between points. Then, it doesn’t matter where it’s running.

That    allows us the capacity. So if we have a fare sale and I need to add    capacity on some of our services, it gives our us and our team that run    the infrastructure the ability to bring up new services on new VMs    seamlessly. It plugs right into how we're doing things, so that internal    cloud allows us not to experience blips.

It's been a great add for us from a capacity management perspective and being able to get the right capacity, with the right    applications, at the right time. It allows us to manage that in such a    way that it’s transparent to our end-users so they don’t notice any  of   this is going on in the background, and the experience is not  different.

...  We started our virtualized   environments about 18 months ago. We went  from a very small amount of   virtualization to what we coined our  Server 2.0 strategy, which was   really the combination of  commodity-based hardware blades with VMware on   that.

And that  allowed us last year in the first and second   quarter to grow from  several hundred VMs to over several thousand, which   is where we're at  today in the production environment. If you talk   about production,  development, and test, production is just one of those   environments.

It  has allowed us to scale that very rapidly   without having to add a  thousand physical servers. And it has been a   tremendous benefit for us  in managing our power, space, and cooling in   the data center,    along with allowing our engineers who are doing the day-to-day work  to   have a single way to manage it, deploy, and move stuff around even   more  automatically. They don’t have to mess with that anymore, VMware   just  takes care of the different products that are part of the VMware   Suite.

Gardner: And your  confidence, has it risen to the  level where you're looking at  70, 80,  90, even more percent of  virtualization? How do you expect to  end that  journey?

Ready for the evolution

Young: I would love to be at 100 percent virtualized. That would be   fantastic.  I think unfortunately we still have some manufacturers and   software  vendors -- and we call them vendors, because typically we   don’t say  partners -- who decide they are not going to support their   software  running in the virtualized environment. That can create   problems,  especially when you need to keep some of those systems up 24 x   7, 365,  with 99.95 percent availability.

We're hoping that    changes, but the goal would be to move as much as we can, because if I    take a look at virtualization, we are kind of our internal private    cloud. What that’s really doing is getting us ready for the evolution    that’s going to happen over the next, 5, 7, or 10 years, where you may    have applications and data deployed out in a cloud, a virtual private cloud, public cloud if the security becomes good enough, where you've got to bring all that stuff together.

If you need to have huge amounts of capacity and two applications are not co-located that need to talk back and forth, you've got to be much more  efficient   on the calls and the communications and make that seamless  for the   customer.

This is giving us the platform to start  learning more   and start developing those solutions that don’t need to  be collocated in   a data center or in one or two data centers, but can  really be pushed   wherever it makes sense. That could be from wherever  the most efficient   data center is from a green technology perspective,  use the least   electricity and cooling power, to alternate energy, to  what makes sense   at the time of the year.

That is a huge add  and a huge win for  us  in the IT community to be able to start  utilizing some of that   virtualization and even across physical  locations.

Gardner: Is there a   centralization feature to this that also is paying dividends?

Young: That’s a huge cornerstone of the suite of tools that we've been able   to  get through VMware is being able to deploy custom solutions and  even   some of the off-the-shelf solutions on a standard platform,  standard   operating systems, standard configurations, standard  containers for the   web, etc. It allows us to deploy that stuff within  minutes, whereas it   used to take engineers manually going to configure  each thing   separately. That’s been a huge savings.

The other  thing is, once   you get the configuration right and you have it  automated, you don’t   have to worry about people taking some human  missteps. Those are going   to happen, and you've got to go back and  redo something. That   elimination of error and the speed at which we  can do that is helping.   As you expand your server footprints and the  number of VMs and servers   you have without having to add to your  staff, you can actually do more   with the same number of or fewer  staff.

Gardner: How you feel about desktop virtualization?

Young: What’s really driven us to take a look  at  it is that around our  environment we can control security on virtual   desktops, etc., very  clearly, very quickly and deliver that in a great   service.

New mobile devices

The    other thing that’s leading to this is, not just what we talked about   in  security, is the plethora of brand new mobile devices -- iPhones, iPads, Android devices, Galaxy. HP has a new device. RIM has a new device. We need to be able to deliver our services in a  more   ubiquitous manner. The virtual desktop allows us to go ahead and   deliver  some of those where I don’t need to control the hardware. I   just  control the interface, which can protect our systems virtually,   and it’s  really pretty neat.

I was on one of my devices the   other day and  was able to go in via virtual desktop that was set up to   be able to use  some of the core systems without having all that stuff   loaded on my  machine, and that was via the Internet. So it worked out   phenomenally  well.

Now, there are some issues that you have to   do depending on  whether you're doing collocation and facility, but you   can easily get  through some of that with the right virtualization  setup  and networking.

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