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Overview
The Challenge
Cathay Pacific needed to upgrade its engineering system infrastructure to meet the demands for more processing power and better data management as it rolled out the final phases of its Ultramain implementation.
The Solution
The airline purchased IBM eServer p690 and p630 to provide RAS capabilities while safely storing their valuable bit of information on high-availability SAN solution, IBM TotalStorage DS4400.
The Benefits
The new architecture provided visible improvements to user response times, future-proofed Cathay Pacific's engineering system infrastructure for the next five years while allowing them to focus on other value-added services.
Dedication to high-quality service has elevated Cathay Pacific Airways to new heights of success in the highly-competitive airline industry. The winner of numerous awards, including the renowned Airline of the Year 2005 by UK-based Skytrax Research, is also well aware that it requires the right people and the right infrastructure in order to constantly maintain their high service levels.
Cathay Pacific has always relied on Information Technology (IT) to meet their infrastructure demands while gearing up its internal operations for efficiency. IT provides the airlines with two distinct advantages—an efficient reservation system and an engineering system that keep the airlines' planes constantly fit for air travel.
With customer expectations soaring to new heights and the travel industry experiencing uncertain times, Cathay Pacific decided to streamline its processes for further efficiency. The company took the proactive step to revamp the internal infrastructure of its vast engineering department to meet future demand. They did it with Ultramain.
Ultramain is an integrated logistics and engineering maintenance system designed ground-up to cope with the unique demands of industries like airlines. Ultramain comprises a functionally high-end suite of integrated applications that meets the unique needs of maintenance management and logistics organizations worldwide.
Ultramain is also business-process driven and adopts the industry’s best practices within its numerous processes. At the same time, it is also flexible and uses simple software switches to evolve as business requirements change.
For all these reasons and more, Cathay Pacific decided to deploy Ultramain. Since the scope of the project was ambitious and the nature was mission critical, the company decided to take a phased approach. Each phase introduced new functionality and one part of the Ultramain jigsaw puzzle. The first phase was thus completed in 2002.
At Cathay Pacific, Ultramain is primarily used by the company’s engineering department to keep track of the maintenance requirements of Cathay Pacific’s global fleet of aircrafts. It integrates anything related to engineering, including material management and maintenance planning, into one complete solution. At the back-end, a relational database manages all the mission-critical data used by the engineering department.
For all the benefits Ultramain provided, Cathay Pacific soon realized that it demanded performance. Although the original infrastructure, which was deployed in 2001 to run Ultramain, worked fine, rising data volumes and usage were worrying Cathay Pacific. Acknowledging that Ultramain’s performance will be crucial to their entire business, the engineering department decided to upgrade its internal server infrastructure for higher performance and better reliability.
"With efficiency in mind, we wanted a state-of-the-art architecture that could support Ultramain for next five years," said Raymond Kwong, Project Manager, Information Management Department, Cathay Pacific Airways Limited. |
The Cathay Pacific engineering team came across IBM systems when they were reflecting on whether to use a Linux system to keep the costs down or continue to use UNIX-based systems. Although Cathay Pacific eventually decided on the latter, they were also convinced that IBM systems can help them meet their infrastructure needs. So they decided to make an in-depth comparison of both IBM and the existing vendor's offerings.
"The choice was, however, not an overnight decision; both offerings were subjected to a detailed comparison that involved six main criteria. Chief among them was that the new machines must allow for a smooth migration," said Mr Kwong.
Reliability, availability and serviceability were also critical areas of concern since Ultramain was a mission-critical application that the entire engineering department relied on. In addition, the cost/benefit ratio of each solution was compared.
After an extensive evaluation in 2004, both vendors had very close scores. But IBM clinched the deal by performing well in both the technology and innovation criteria.
"We were confident that IBM systems will meet our needs, and so we made the bold move to switch. As you can imagine, it was a big move to us," said Cam Ng, Systems Manager for Airline Operations, Information Management, Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd. |
The back-end database server itself was deployed on an IBM eServer pSeries 690 which provided Cathay Pacific the fastest POWER4+ processor ever at 1.7GHz, along with high-performance 567MHz memory, Level 3 (L3) cache and a new I/O subsystem with nearly triple the I/O bandwidth.
At the same time, the pSeries 690 also took advantage of the Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS) capabilities that IBM spent years developing. These capabilities ensure that the servers operate reliably, efficiently handle infrequent failures with minimal disruption to the business, and provide timely and competent repair. In short, it gave Cathay Pacific a peace of mind and ensured that Ultramain ran smoothly.
Cathay Pacific fully utilised p690's logical partitioning (LPAR) technology, which provided the airlines tremendous flexibility in tailoring each partition to meet separate demands. "In one server, we created four partitions; three were used for Ultramain's data mart requirements and the remaining partition was used to store and run the corporate database," said Mr Kwong.
Another p690's feature allowed Cathay Pacific to meet future performance demands by switching on available microprocessors in the server itself. In the current configuration, 22 CPUs are being actively used. However when the need arises, this number can be increased to 24, allowing Cathay Pacific to meet new data loads when required.
An additional IBM eServer pSeries 630 was deployed as a backup server at Cathay Pacific's disaster recovery centre. |
The millions of bits of information crucial for Ultramain's smooth operation were housed in an IBM TotalStorage DS4400 (formerly FAStT700).
Offering 2Gbps technology for faster response time, the DS4400 included IBM FlashCopy, VolumeCopy and Enhanced Remote Mirroring that were designed to help increase data protection for Cathay Pacific.
Mr Kwong was especially impressed with the FlashCopy feature, which he regarded as a big advantage over rival products as it allowed his team an easy and flexible way to manage their backup copies.
DS4400's Dynamic Volume Expansion also simplified data management and the high-availability design enhanced Ultramain's access to data. Most important of all, the DS4400 was SAN-ready, allowing Cathay Pacific to ease management workload by centralising storage.
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Although IBM scored well in innovation, both Mr Ng and Mr Kwong were certainly impressed with IBM's service quality.
IBM provided capacity planning, which allowed Cathay Pacific to know the models they needed to invest in order to meet future growth requirements, and implementation services to deploy the entire infrastructure.
"IBM's close attention to service qualities did not waver even after the successful implementation and they responded quickly to any issues that we encountered thereafter," said Mr Kwong.
This high level of quality service gave Mr Kwong and his team added assurance that IBM will take care of their needs and requirements in the future.
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When the systems went live in 2004, the IBM-based infrastructure met all of its Cathay Pacific's engineering system needs and Ultramain's performance requirements.
In some ways, IBM systems even surpassed Cathay Pacific's initial expectations. "IBM exceeded our expectations in two areas: they furnished us with more powerful IBM servers than the ones we originally budgeted for, and the users were very happy with the response times of the entire system," said Mr Ng.
Cathay Pacific can also now worry less about future performance and reliability of their system. "In the next five years, we will have one less problem to worry and this is excellent news for us," said Mr Ng.
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