Brisbane Airport Opts for Cisco, EMC and Vmware

Brisbane
Airport Corporation Pty Ltd (BAC), the operator and developer of
Brisbane Airport, which facilitates the movement of more than 21 million
passengers and tons of freight each year, has selected virtualization
technology from Cisco Systems, Inc., EMC Corp. and VMware to improve business agility and airport
operational effectiveness.

Brisbane Airport is one of the premier aviation hubs in AsiaPac servicing more than 21 million passengers, 420 businesses, 20,000
workers located at the airport, 27 airlines, the community and government. In
the future, BAC’s strategic vision is to transform Brisbane Airport into a
major commercial center for business and leisure that supports the economic and
cultural growth of Brisbane and Queensland, and acknowledges the important role
it plays in Brisbane’s transformation into a new world city.

"To achieve our vision,
Brisbane Airport requires a highly available and resilient data center
infrastructure platform that will scale to support our future expansion. The
selection of Cisco, EMC and VMware helps fulfill this requirement while also
providing us with the business agility to create and rapidly deliver new
services to the business," said Stephen Tukavkin, technology manager,
Brisbane Airport Corporation.

BAC selected Corpnet, recently acquired by Logicalis Group Ltd, to deploy a private
cloud built on the Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS), Cisco Nexus
switches, EMC VNX storage system and VMware vSphere server virtualization software
to support it as follows:

• Agility and Scale in the Data
  Center to Align with Business Growth: BAC’s IT
  organization combined its networking, computing, storage and server
  virtualization in a private cloud for rapid provision of new services and
  applications to the business with Cisco UCS. BAC IT already provides Cisco Wi-Fi access to passengers in the domestic and international
  terminals, businesses in the retail precinct, and employees and contractors in
  the aviation and maintenance hubs which may be extended as a platform for new
  service delivery that helps improve convenience and productivity at Brisbane
  Airport. Even with BAC’s future infrastructure commitments, including a new
  parallel runway and upgrading terminals, and increased freight operations, the
  Cisco, EMC and VMware system can meet the demanding performance and
  scalability demands.
• Reduced Data Centre Carbon
  Footprint and Cooling Costs: By centralizing and
  virtualizing different projects and applications to create virtual network
  resources, BAC expects to reduce its energy consumption and cooling costs by
  approximately 20%. Since BAC began virtualizing with VMware ESX 3.5,
  approximately 80% of its environment has been reduced which is estimated to
  reflect the removal of 70 physical servers from operation.
• Operational
  Efficiency: By streamlining operations and
  providing a ‘single pane of glass’ with Cisco UCS Manager for automated,
  policy-based management, BAC reduces its risk and improves operational agility
  and scalability. These efficiencies have helped increase BAC IT staff
  productivity, freeing staff to focus more on strategic and business
  initiatives. With airport business operations absolutely critical, the platform
  is planned and designed with 99.999% availability with site recovery across
  data centers.

"Having worked closely
with the BAC team over a number of years, Corpnet (recently acquired by
Logicalis), understood both the technology and business challenges facing BAC.
The design and integration of leading technologies from Cisco, EMC and VMware
provided the perfect combination of agility, technology and enablement to meet
the requirements for BAC today and well into the future," said
Jonathan Pannell, enterprise solution specialist, Logicalis Queensland.

EMC’s VNX 5300 storage solution is designed for virtualised
environments such as Brisbane Airport Corporation. Incorporating FAST (Fully
Automated Storage Tiering) technology, EMC VNX arrays move hot data to enterprise flash drives to improve application and storage
system performance and moves less active data to lower storage tiers to reduce
costs. In addition FAST delivers efficiency, including lowering power and cooling expenses, while
improving and lowering operating expenses.

"For Brisbane Airport Corporation,
this results in a low-risk storage environment, coupled with predictable
performance, vital in a virtualized desk-top environment," said Darren
McCullum, VCE, VMware and Cisco Technology Alliance manager.

"It’s always exciting for us to work
with our customers and partners, to help transform their business, achieving
greater agility and efficiency, and ultimately realizing significant power
reduction and the resultant positive environmental impact for which our
technology is world renowned," said Duncan Bennt, VP, VMware, ANZ.

"Like many other
enterprises, airports must provide the highest availability of operations while
offering maximum flexibility to accommodate the ever changing needs of their
business environment. Cisco is pleased that Brisbane Airport Corporation has
selected the scalable and easy to manage Cisco Unified Computing System to
provide it with more flexibility and greater agility as it expands to achieve
its ‘Airport City’ vision," said Courtney Dodds, the data center
portfolio manager for Cisco ANZ.