The Dublin Airport Authority is planning a significant virtualisation project with an estimated spend of more than €400,000.
Earlier this week, the authority issued a tender, saying the virtualisation project would be “a core component of its IT strategy”.
As a result of moving to a virtual platform across Dublin, Cork and Shannon airports, the DAA said it expects to see a reduction in operational costs, as well as high availability, scalability and flexibility for all server resources.
DAA currently uses Microsoft Windows 200X as its core platform for Intel systems on 264+ server hardware that is between one to four years old. As part of an infrastructure refresh, the authority intends to migrate the majority of its Windows systems and other key server resources into a virtualised environment.
As part of the project, the DAA’s HP-based storage area network is to be replaced, along with its current Dell ML6000 backup system. There is also a co-existing pilot virtualisation environment running up to 50 virtual systems. This, too, will have to be moved to the new virtualisation solution.
The tender specifies that Prince2/PMP methodology is to be used to manage the project. Its key aims are to reduce power consumption and cooling costs, lower hardware costs, lower the timescales involved in server deployments, decrease physical space requirements and reduce the network administration overhead.
