Air New Zealand Data Centre Programme Completes

Air New Zealand Data Centre Programme Completes
 
Air New Zealand has successfully migrated its full IT footprint to new data centre facilities and is now the only New Zealand corporate to have its production and development systems supported by Tier 3 or above availability across two separate commercially available sites. 
 
Air New Zealand is now operating from the Civil Defence rated data centre in Airedale Street, central Auckland, operated by Gen-i.
 
The airline has also recently completed its migration into a second data centre, housing production and development systems located in Highbrook, South Auckland, operated by IBM.
 
Air New Zealand Chief Financial Officer Rob McDonald says the IT programme spanned two years and represented the largest IT infrastructure change programme undertaken to date at the airline
 
“Far beyond a logistical ‘lift and shift’ exercise, Air New Zealand seized the opportunity to build new where appropriate and decommission legacy platforms,” says Mr McDonald
 
The combination of new facilities and new core infrastructure significantly reduces business risk of failure of critical systems.  
 
The upgraded network, supported by significant re-architecture of high severity systems, supports active-active production configurations across sites ensuring failover is, in many cases, instantaneous.
 
“The opportunity to build new core and shared infrastructure in advance of the migration also significantly de-risked the migration programme of key systems into the new facilities and supported rigorous testing of the improved failover capability, says Mr McDonald.
 
The success of the programme required true collaboration within a multi-vendor environment.

·         Air NZ partnered with Techspace to provide programme leadership

·         IBM technical delivery extended across Mainframe, VM, Midrange, Middleware and Highbrook datacentre facilities

·         gen-i delivery for core network for both sites, inter-site dark fibre connectivity and Airedale Street datacentre facilities

·         Storage re-platform and consolidation to a single storage layer provided by OSS

·         Dimension Data delivered Wintel  

·         Enterprise IT had responsibility for the Oracle programme to upgrade and consolidate the database layer 
 
Air New Zealand Chief Information Officer Julia Raue says the programme has delivered ahead of schedule and completed under budget. 
 
“Air New Zealand would like to acknowledge the skill, pragmatism and dedication of our full IT team, along with the vendors we partnered with on this programme, to achieve this significant outcome,” says Ms Raue.
 
ENDS

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