INDUSTRY WATCH
the different components instead of
simply relying on external parties to bring
their solution as one box without Gulf
Air having control or knowledge about
the different components. This way Gulf
Air was able to use the best of breed for
each component belonging to different
providers and integrating them all together
to provide the optimal and cohesive
solution, benefiting from the strengths
of each that would be lost if a one-box
approach was followed. This ensured that
Gulf Air’s resources develop the technical
knowledge and expertise of the required
skills to design, implement, support and
maintain such solutions.
The design also provided an offline
mode for tablets in order to minimise the
dependencies on Internet connection
which is difficult to allocate in different
airports/stations around the world, and
established procedures to regularly
monitor and update tablets to ensure they
always have the latest version of materials,
and to restrict access in the tablet to
prevent personal usage and misuse. These
procedures cover thorough health check
and monitoring of the devices around the
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clock, and in case of any breach or loss an
alert is raised immediately to Gulf Air flight
operators.
In addition, Gulf Air has deployed
internally e-Learning Management system
based on open-source solutions that can
offer mobile and tablet compatible online
courses and exams. This has been used
initially for the pilots and cabin crew to
conduct their training courses (as required
by the civil aviation authorities) directly on
their tablets at their leisure anywhere.
What would you say are
the specific business results
generated by the project?
Several achievements were accomplished
as a result of the re-engineered data
centre:
• Tier3 compliance
• Green IT
• 99.7% availability
• CAT7A/Fibre DC cabling infrastructure
• Increased power redundancy(n+1)
• Reduced power consumption by 30%
• Reduced Physical servers count by
35%(24%cost saving)
• software licenses reduction (17% cost
saving)
• Reduced infrastructure age to 3 years
• 41% cost saving in capital
expenditure.
The new DC can host equipment by five
times more (with smaller space (-30%),
less power (-30%) and less cooling
(-20%), F5 and IPS are scalable enough
to cater for current requirements and
future expansion for the coming five years.
The remote access solution is scalable for
more than 10,000 concurrent sessions.
This renovation enabled business to
introduce more services to passengers
such as Electronic Flight Bags, In-Flight
Services, Catering Management System,
Big Data, BI Reports, and enabled Gulf Air
44 stations round the globe to connect
virtually to Gulf Air cloud to share business
systems/data.
And the Big Data solution has reduced
the manual work, instead of going over
thousands and thousands of online posts,
all are processed in minutes and results
are free from human errors which show
each topic and the sentiment (positive
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