IBM China/Hong Kong Limited and Hong Kong Air Cargo Terminals Limited (Hactl), announced the successful completion of a data storage infrastructure revamp project, which further enhances the reliability and resilient capability of Hactl's IT systems and ensures efficient and professional cargo handling services. The scalable solution also plays an important role in enabling Hactl to effectively cope with increasing tonnage capacity as its business grows.
Hactl serves close to 90 international airlines and 1,000 freight forwarders, and handles about 70% of air cargo throughput at the Hong Kong International Airport. As the world's largest single air cargo terminal operator, Hactl makes every effort to ensure the reliability of its systems to meet 24x7 business service demands. The company has also launched plans to enhance the resilient capability of its IT infrastructure in the event of a possible disaster.
Anticipation of future air cargo tonnage growth, coupled with support for industry initiatives, such as e-freight, that increase data volumes, made updating Hactl's infrastructure a key business priority. Based on IBM's proven expertise, Hactl selected the company to help reduce downtime, ensure business continuity, and develop forward-looking disaster recovery plans, while managing growing operations.
'To maintain Hactl's leadership position as a premier air cargo hub in the region, we must deliver the highest available uptime and business continuity for our operations,' said Andy Bien, General Manager, Information Services, Hactl. 'IBM helped us meet that challenge through a comprehensive evaluation of our needs and providing end-to-end solutions with professional project management service. Thanks to IBM, Hactl has built a more robust and resilient infrastructure that enhances our service delivery and positions us well to maintain our leadership role in the air cargo industry.'
'IBM is pleased to have helped Hactl in deploying innovative technology to reduce risk and manage growth,' said Brian Uy, Executive, Systems & Technology Group, IBM China/Hong Kong Limited. 'Not only has Hactl minimized risk through disaster recovery planning and complexity through virtualization, but with this new infrastructure, they are driving innovation that enables scaling to effectively manage tonnage increases, data volume and improve service levels.'
IBM conducted a thorough assessment of Hactl's existing infrastructure and business challenges throughout the project. As a result, IBM helped Hactl develop a blueprint for disaster recovery, allocate system resources more effectively, better control application quality of service, and improve Hactl's ability to easily scale to meet increased data requirements and future disaster recovery plans. The solution included:
- Devising a High Availability and Disaster Recovery Blueprint with a new Storage Area Network (SAN) infrastructure and the DS8300 Storage System. The end-to-end resilient storage infrastructure caters for a highly available 24x7 production, and the storage-based Synchronous Remote Mirroring function (Metro Mirror) supports a reliable, zero data loss and high performance (up to 16Gbps data transfer rate) Disaster Recovery solution. Such solutions guarantee absolute data integrity whenever a Disaster Recovery scenario is invoked. With the high performance data transfer rate to support spontaneous data replication at background, Hactl benefits from close to zero latency in its normal data access service.
- Developing a Backup and Restore Plan by leveraging IBM Virtual Tape Library TS7500 series to streamline backup process and improve backup/recovery time by alleviating physical tape library constraints. This also provides the flexibility to allocate virtual resources for the increased number of backup tasks and deliver high performance with the new disk technology. This deployment has significantly shortened Hactl
