Rapid growth in store for Flight Centre
Rapid growth in store for Flight Centre
Flight Centre has enlisted Hitachi Data Systems to set up a storage system so that the popular flight company can cope with its massive growth around the world, which looks set to continue at a phenomenal pace.
At the moment, Flight Centre opens up a new retail outlet somewhere in the world every 20 working hours, which is roughly one and a half new stores a week.
Hitachi Data Systems, combined with partners - Cisco Systems, Quantum and CommVault will deliver a complete storage solution that aims to improve overall responsiveness, minimise risk and at the same time, provide Flight Centre's growth potential over the next five years.
Mr Geoff Tyerman, Flight Centre's technical services manager said. "This contract was awarded on three main criteria: the ability to understand our business goals and to work with us to meet them; the ability to provide a tightly integrated complete solution for our AIX, Windows and RedHat environments; and a demonstrated ability to professionally deliver high levels of customer service. Hitachi Data Systems won on all three measurements."
Flight Centre was very wise about the way it approached introducing the data recovery element to the infrastructure. The Hitachi Thunder 9500V and CommVault Galaxy Backup & Recovery software was implemented to allow deleted and lost files to be recovered in minutes instead of hours across the enterprise. Tim Smith, marketing manager for Hitachi Data Systems in Australia and New Zealand, said. "Flight Centre has been clever in the way it has split its business into two areas. The core business, which provides the flights, and an IT division, named Cadre, which provides the IT infrastructure to the business.
"At the moment, there are about 1500 stores worldwide and this storage infrastructure needed to be in place to support the primary ticketing system and financial systems. All these stores will use the two Thunder 9500Vs based in Brisbane and Windsor, Queensland as a central repository for storing this information. We have provided a SAN to manage these two systems. The beauty of the systems is that if somebody' itinerary is lost in a local store in South Africa, it can be retrieved very quickly by the IT team from a disk back-up based in one of the two Queensland offices. The data in the past would have to be retrieved from a tape system, which would take much longer."
The two Brisbane and the Windsor centre are connected via a dark fibre which provides uninterrupted service to business critical applications managed remotely by Hitachi HiCommand software.
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