Saudi Arabian Airlines turns to Sun Microsystems technology

JEDDAH - Saudi Arabian Airlines has turned to Sun Microsystems for a complete systems upgrade to meet its growth requirements.

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Published: Sat 5 Jul 2008, 11:31 PM

Last updated: Sun 5 Apr 2015, 12:47 PM

“Growth has been continuous for Saudi Arabian Airlines since its inception - from a single aircraft in 1945 to more than 139 aircraft today. The Saudi national carrier serves more than 13 million passengers every year, and to support this growth, it became important to have the right technological infrastructure to ensure business continuity,” Muhammad Al Bakri, ERP project director and chief of systems engineering and technology, said in information made available to Khaleej Times here on Wednesday.

“Sun’s solution for SAP was convincing; Sun provided an integrated tested solution that can be deployed quickly enough to help reduce cost and risk, improve availability, scalability, security, flexibility, and manageability. The solution is performance-driven, ensures business continuity and has the capacity to accommodate a wide variety of business applications,” Al Bakri explained.

He added that Sun’s infrastructure platform including M8000 and T5210 servers, V490 and V425 storage and back-up solutions will be deployed in three phases to efficiently run the SAP solution. Sun’s system infrastructure consists of a consolidation plan to cover the architectural design for the SAP ERP environment in hardware partitions and clusters with storage replication for the airlines’ disaster recovery site.

“Sun is proud to be a part of Saudi Arabian Airlines’ success story. Sun is helping the airline transform its IT department into a state-of-the-art, modern infrastructure,” said Jamal Said, district sales manager for Sun Microsystems in Saudi Arabia.

“The solution gives it a competitive edge and will scale to meet the airlines’ growth and take it from strength to strength. It will enable the airline to manage mission critical applications, and boost business continuity, while lowering cost of ownership and a reduced time to production readiness,” he added.

He said that STME, Sun’s partner in Saudi Arabia undertook the implementation of the storage and a backup solution for both production and disaster recovery.

Al Bakri said that needing a massive infrastructure upgrade to ensure business continuity to facilitate its current and future growth, Saudia has deployed SAP solutions for a comprehensive ERP solution to integrate and optimise corporate, marketing, operations and e-business systems.

This is done in order to meet the challenges of a burgeoning international airline business, and to overcome limitations in the scope of business functionality.

“To manage and run its business applications, the airline required a robust IT infrastructure to ensures smooth information exchange, reduce downtime, and guarantee 24/7 availability,” he said.


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