Gulf Air invests in new IT infrastructure ‘to meet future data growth’

Cisco will integrate unified data centre architecture for the airline “with intelligent, cloud-ready networks”, the Gulf Daily News said.

According to the report, Cisco “will also provide the integral foundation for Gulf Air's private cloud comprising next-generation infrastructure, Cisco Intelligent Network, which provides a consistent and highly secured user experience, increased speed and optimised operational efficiency in cloud computing and data centre automation”.

Gulf Air’s acting chief executive Maher Salman Al Musallam said Cisco's solutions would help keep the airline “on the cusp of technological advances, while ensuring greater technology solutions to facilitate and enhance the travel experience”.

The airline’s IT director Jassim Haji said: “Gulf Air's energy-efficient IT data centre is recognised as one of the most environmentally-friendly in Bahrain. With this achievement we have taken the first step towards virtualising Gulf Air's network infrastructure in expanding our private cloud, which is a pioneer initiative in this region.”

Haji said: “This is one of the main developments in the airline's ongoing IT infrastructure enhancements, from which numerous benefits have been realised including expanded network capacity, greater robustness, agility and resilience to meet future data growth.”

Earlier this year, Haji said Gulf Air had implemented big data in its private cloud “to perform social media monitoring and sentiment analysis”.

Haji said: “This has enabled us to monitor customer feedback and public perception about Gulf Air in order to quickly respond to customer complaints. We have implemented business intelligence and analytics in the airline, and we are looking into in memory computing as a new initiative to enhance the performance of analysing millions of records, as airlines usually need to, and to be able to provide real time analytics.”

According to Gulf Air, the airline was “the first organisation in Bahrain to introduce private cloud computing in its IT operations”, enabling the carrier to achieve “much faster and more efficient business performance”.