Bahrain-based Gulf Air recently completed a major overhaul of its storage and server systems with the help of Dell EMC, as reported by Computer Weekly. The project involved many parts - cloud storage, scalable storage area network upgrades, local area network upgrades, and hardware updates as well as all of the connections between. This was done in an effort to maximize the capabilities of the airline's systems for the next five years. "It was a complex project," said Jassim Haji Jassim, director of IT at Gulf Air, “It was a mix between full resilience and availability across all the platforms of not only application infrastructure, but databases. It involved virtualising all storage to maximise the use of our storage infrastructure for the next five years.”
By virtue of being an airline that has planes flying at any given hour of the day, this project was met with a critical need to be implemented without disrupting vital running processes or causing downtime. Though the timelines were tight, Gulf Air's IT department organized a plan to implement the upgrades in a logical manner and each step redied the system for the next for as smooth a transition as possible.
Before the transition, Gulf Air utilized EMC Clarion and Hewlett Packard Enterprise EVA storage systems in its data centers. Now, with Dell EMC FAST storage virtualization technology with auto-tiering capabilities in place the airline has met its input/output operations per second (IOPS) requirements, business applications are running more quickly and reliably, and cost savings have been up to 50% in some areas. Dell EMC also assisted to implement retention and recovery systems designed by Gulf Air's IT department.
Gulf Air is pleased with the results of their new system and is currently evaluating new technologies, such as hyper-converged and converged infrastructures, to help them carry their data even further.