Infotech Lead Europe:Cisco, EMC and VMware are set to drive Brisbane Airport’s ’s strategy to improve operational effectiveness.
Brisbane Airport (BAC) has selected virtualization technology from Cisco, EMC and VMware. These three technology majors will help BAC achieve its information and communications technology (ICT) strategy to improve business agility and airport operational effectiveness.
Brisbane Airport serves more than 21 million passengers, 420 businesses, 20,000 workers located at the airport, 27 airlines, the community and government.
Cisco, EMC and VMware will be centralizing and virtualizing different projects and applications to create virtual network resources.
The virtualization initiatives will enable BAC to reduce its energy consumption and cooling costs by approximately 20 percent.
Since BAC began virtualizing with VMware ESX 3.5, approximately 80 percent of its environment has been reduced which is estimated to reflect the removal of 70 physical servers from operation.
“To achieve our vision, Brisbane Airport requires a highly available and resilient data center infrastructure platform that will scale to support our future expansion. The selection of Cisco, EMC and VMware helps fulfill this requirement while also providing us with the business agility to create and rapidly deliver new services to the business,” said Stephen Tukavkin, technology manager, Brisbane Airport Corporation.
BAC selected Corpnet, recently acquired by Logicalis, to deploy a private cloud built on the Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS), Cisco Nexus switches, EMC VNX storage system and VMware vSphere server virtualization software to support it.
BAC IT provides Cisco Wi-Fi access to passengers in the domestic and international terminals, businesses in the retail precinct, and employees and contractors in the aviation and maintenance hubs. With BAC’s infrastructure commitments, including a new parallel runway and upgrading terminals, and increased freight operations, the Cisco, EMC and VMware system can meet demanding scalability demands.
By streamlining operations and providing a single pane of glass with Cisco UCS Manager for automated, policy-based management, BAC reduces its risk and improves operational agility and scalability. These efficiencies have helped increase BAC IT staff productivity, freeing staff to focus more on strategic, business-critical initiatives. With airport business operations absolutely critical, the platform is planned and designed with 99.999 percent availability with site recovery across data centers.
“Having worked closely with the BAC team over a number of years, Corpnet (recently acquired by Logicalis), understood both the technology and business challenges facing BAC. The design and integration of leading technologies from Cisco, EMC and VMware provided the perfect combination of agility, technology and enablement to meet the requirements for BAC today and well into the future,” said Jonathan Pannell, Enterprise Solution Specialist, Logicalis Queensland.
“For Brisbane Airport Corporation, this results in a low-risk storage environment, coupled with predictable performance, vital in a virtualized desk-top environment,” said Darren McCullum, VCE, VMware and Cisco Technology Alliance Manager.
“It’s always exciting for us to work with our customers and partners, to help transform their business, achieving greater agility and efficiency, and ultimately realizing significant power reduction and the resultant positive environmental impact for which our technology is world renowned,” said Duncan Bennt, VP, VMware, ANZ.
“Like many other enterprises, airports must provide the highest availability of operations while offering maximum flexibility to accommodate the ever changing needs of their business environment. Cisco is pleased that Brisbane Airport Corporation has selected the scalable and easy to manage Cisco Unified Computing System to provide it with more flexibility and greater agility as it expands to achieve its ‘Airport City’ vision,” said Courtney Dodds, data center portfolio manager for Cisco Australia and New Zealand.
