Eyes on the Skies
Eyes on the Skies
No-one needs to be reminded of the importance of air traffic control, but with the amount of information that passes through an organisation such as Airservices Australia, which has 26 air traffic control towers, it is essential that the people who control the technology have an extremely reliable system in place. Rodney Appleyard reports on how Airservices Australia has gone to great lengths to make sure we do not need to worry about them being in control of information related to highways in the skies
Airservices Australia covers 51,786,992 sq kilometres (about 11 percent of the world’s total airspace), employs 2900 staff and has $550 million fixed assets spread over 600 sites in Australia. This is as well as having 26 air traffic control towers, two control centres and 17 aviation rescue and fire stations at the nation’s busiest airports. It records every flight taken in Australia, apart from helicopter flights between farms.
As a government-owned corporation, its aim is to provide safe and environmentally sound air traffic control management and related air services to the aviation industry. It is responsible for the management of this airspace as well as for the provision of air traffic and navigational services and associated aeronautical information required by both the domestic and international aviation industries.
But the organisation had to change its IT system in recent years because it needed a more reliable backup system to allow important information on every flight to be recalled in case of emergencies.
Craig McGill, the former manager of storage infrastructure systems at AirServices Australia explains why the organisation needed to fix its logistical back-up problems due to a large growth in servers – 200 – supporting business systems.
“We needed to change from our legacy system of Open VMS system when we rolled out Windows in seven offices. Our company’s IT department carried out an analysis and compared multiple vendors. In the end, we opted to go for CommVault Galaxy, mainly because of its ability to do granular level restores of Exchange objects. This meant that it could find specific emails that had been deleted from each individual’s account.
“One of the major reasons why we needed to change to CommVault Galaxy was because if we had stuck with the VMS system, we would have had many different, disparate products that would not be able to communicate with each other. However, by rolling out systems to a Windows and Unix environment, CommVault Galaxy can interact with every system.”
The Galaxy backup system allows users now within the organisation to recover any deleted messages in a very short space of time. For instance, a user might know that there was an important email in his/her inbox, but cannot find it, or cannot remember deleting it. Regardless of this situation, a backup of all emails is saved by the CommVault Galaxy system, so that the deleted email can be recovered in minutes without any downtime to the user.
Airservices Australia was also pleasantly surprised to find that CommVault Galaxy provided sufficient backup capabilities when it implemented its new operational data warehouse. This new warehouse can hold thousands of changes to flight plans; different routes taken due to weather; and many other examples, which are expected to add up to 1.2 terabytes of information that needs backing up every night.
McGill was thrilled that the CommVault Galaxy system could link into this Oracle database, despite managers looking at many other products.
“It can do multiple backups at once, which means we can fill up lots of different tapes at the same time with backed up data. It can run four different streams at the same time. This means that the information about all flight changes can be backed up in four hours and are kept available 24/7. The system has been in place for six months now, and it has done very well so far.”
Gerry Sillars, the director of CommVault Systems for Oceania, explains why he believes that Airservices Australia made that right move to install this backup system.
“Airservices Australia managed to unite their disparate backup systems so that they could share all the system. The application has aided the organisation to gain greater availability of their data when they need it. They can now use one application to manage storage, gain snapshots to specific data, ensure business continuity, meet compliance needs, assign different hierarchies of storage and recover data with ease.
“Of course they are in the serious business of keeping planes in the sky. Our system ensures that the information they need to make sure this business continues can run smoothly, without data going missing. They can monitor the status of backups all the time, so they do not need to constantly interrogate their systems anymore.”
There is no doubt that Airservices Australia has found the CommVault Galaxy system a complete success, judging by its plans to take in more information about what happens on flights around Australia. The organisation is looking into gathering more records about flight changes and unexpected influences that cause planes to change their plans. This is all thanks to the reliability the organisation has found with the Galaxy system. More records will mean more intelligence for the organisation to provide transparency over every flight, which could be useful to understand why things go wrong sometimes, so that changes can be made for the better in the future. In addition, the availability of every email through the backup systems is also essential for compliance reasons. The next few months will be very revealing to see if the backup systems can sustain their robustness over the course of a year.
Comment on this story
Related Article: