Airplane Guidance System Depends on StorMagic Virtual SAN to Prevent Downtime
Bristol, United Kingdom (PRWEB) October 25, 2017 -- StorMagic, the company that makes virtual SANs simple for edge computing, today announced that Lisbon Airport has implemented StorMagic SvSAN for its mission-critical airplane docking and guidance system to ensure uptime and minimize costs. The solution was implemented on servers that reside 1.5Km apart to ensure that airplanes could still safely make it to their gates, even if there is a local outage.
As passenger numbers increase and pressure on Lisbon airport’s infrastructure grows, the IT department is tasked with operating the airport and maintaining a high level of service, while allowing airlines to meet their own service levels and punctuality targets. A vital element to achieve this is the airport’s Advanced Visual Docking Guiding System (A-VDGS). This allows pilots to quickly and efficiently dock their aircraft, ensuring the planes remain clear of obstructions and that the jetways can reach the plane doors.
The IT systems running the A-VDGS in Lisbon had become old and outdated. Right from the outset, cost was a major factor as the search for a replacement began. The project’s total budget was strictly controlled and needed to include all the server hardware, software and a new highly secure network for this critical project. The airport needed new servers which could be spread over multiple locations for disaster recovery and full redundancy. This was critical as the guiding systems are an integral part of the airport’s operations. An additional aim of the project was to allow the airport to utilize all of VMware’s features included with their Enterprise edition of vSphere, but VMware’s virtual storage solution proved too expensive. Thanks to its full compatibility and integration with vSphere, the IT team was able to select StorMagic SvSAN to provide the highly available virtual storage on which the A-VDGS would run, at a fraction of the cost of VMware vSAN.
StorMagic SvSAN was deployed in two locations 1.5km apart within Lisbon Airport (each with its own fully redundant power) to ensure redundancy and mitigate against localized disasters that might result in unscheduled downtime. Within a couple of days of deploying SvSAN, the IT team was able to create a fully redundant scenario - validating SvSAN’s capabilities in delivering a highly available solution which eliminates downtime. The project lead, Pedro Ponte, IT Consultant for ANA Aeroportos at Lisbon Airport, couldn’t believe the results; “it was really amazing” he said when describing how quickly and easily SvSAN was set up and operational. Another key benefit that ANA has realized from the project is that even planned downtime for this application was completely eliminated. Whenever there is a need to update servers (hardware, software, firmware) they are able to fail one server and let the active server temporarily handle all IO, and then fail-back and update the second server. This saves the IT team considerable time and effort and allows updates to happen during operational hours.
“I can’t believe how easy and reliable StorMagic SvSAN truly is. The Lisbon airport now has the confidence that our airplane docking/guiding system can survive almost any type of failure, and we saved a whole bunch of money along the way.” Pedro Ponte, IT Consultant, ANA Aeroportos de Portugal
As the Portuguese airport authority, ANA Aeroportos is responsible for managing 10 of Portugal’s public airports, including the country’s largest - Lisbon Airport - which is also known as Humberto Delgado Airport. Lisbon Airport is the main international gateway to Portugal and a major European hub, ranked 24th largest in Europe by passenger volume. In 2016 it served 22.4 million passengers, the most in its history. It is the most strategically important European hub to Brazil, and is also one of the most important European hubs to Africa.
About StorMagic
StorMagic makes virtual SANs simple for edge computing. Our product, SvSAN, is designed specifically for small and large enterprises with one to thousands of locations that require highly available compute and storage at the lowest possible cost. Underpinned by simplicity, cost-effectiveness and flexibility, StorMagic SvSAN removes the need for a physical SAN in some of the world’s most demanding environments by converting the disk, flash and memory of two servers into a virtual SAN.
Bruce Kornfeld, StorMagic, http://www.stormagic.com, +1 5128277114, [email protected]
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