When the core applications at an airport suffer because of the lack of performance of the IT infrastructure, it creates a domino effect. All the systems connected to those applications suffer. CIAL, Cochi International Airport Limited, faced the same problem.

CIAL, with a total annual traffic of around 4.7 million passengers, is the third busiest airport in India for international traffic. It won the “Champion of the Earth” award in 2018, the highest environmental honor instituted by the United Nations. It is the first fully solar-powered airport in the world.

The iconic airport handles three passenger terminals and one cargo terminal with the capacity to handle an annual traffic of 10.2 million passengers.

Operations at CIAL Held Back by Their IT Infrastructure

The core applications like SAP and Oracle at CIAL were running on a virtualized hardware environment. It came with a few disadvantages.

Loss in Performance

Virtualization introduces a little overhead. And for resource-intensive applications that SAP and Oracle, it impacted their performance.

Resource Management Complexity

Multiple virtual machines (VMs) share the same physical hardware resources. Managing them was difficult. It caused resource contention occasionally, causing slowdowns or outages for applications when other VMs consume too many resources.

With too many virtual machines to manage, the complexity of management also increased. IT staff at CIAL monitored and maintained the hypervisor, VMs, and all the underlying infrastructure. This complexity increased the probability of configuration errors or system failures.

Cost, Backup, and High Availability

SAP and Oracle charge licensing fees based on the number of cores or CPUs used in the virtual environment. With increasing performance demands, the costs go up exponentially.

Because of the complexity of the virtual environment, backups, disaster recovery, and failover mechanisms are tedious to execute. If not done and managed properly, it can hamper high availability and uptime.

Because of these shortcomings, several airport systems such as Asset Management, Supply Chain, CRM system, ERP system, and critical airport operations like Flight Operations, Baggage Handling, and Passenger Information systems suffered.

To combat these, CIAL had a clear set of guidelines for us to work.

The Goals Set by CIAL

1. Upgrading the data centers and implementing an Active-Active Data Centre solution

2. Setting up a private cloud

3. Entirely replace the existing ‘traditional solution’

4. Install cloud backup solution

5. Managed services for their two data centers

Is your current IT infrastructure holding your operations back? Our team can help. Contact us.

The Private Cloud Journey of CIAL

The IT team has evaluated their current setup and narrowed down on a Hyperconverged Infrastructure for the airport's digital transformation journey. CIAL chose Netcon as its implementation partner.

Why Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Airport?

As we used it to replace the traditional infrastructure, it obviously addressed the shortcomings of the former. Let us see how.

Simplicity and Scalability

HCI environment combines computing, storage, and networking into a single integrated platform. It is the reason why it is called hyper-converged infrastructure. It simplifies management and scalability. Adding new nodes is straightforward and is done without significant disruptions.

Optimization and Flexibility

With the ability to dynamically allocate resources, it optimizes CPU power, memory, and storage usage by allocating them based on the application and its needs. It, in turn, gives efficient utilization of space at the data center. It addresses the pain of reduced performance and high licensing costs.

High Availability With Disaster Recovery

Supporting high availability features, such as data redundancy, automatic failover, and seamless resource migration, means the airport operations can function uninterrupted. There is in-built data replication and backup to simplify disaster recovery and recovery planning and execution.

Centralised Management, Leading to Better Security

A single console centralized management interface makes monitoring and administering the entire infrastructure much easier. It streamlines IT operations and troubleshooting. With role-based access control, firewalls, and data encryption, it is more secure too.

Considering a hyper-converged infrastructure? Check here if you really need it or not.

Assessing, Designing, and Implementing

It started with the current performance requirements of the airport. We also took into account the projected future demands. We considered the specific needs of SAP and Oracle applications, performance expectations, scalability, and redundancy requirements.

After a thorough assessment, the team created a detailed design for the execution plan. We procured the hardware and software that would meet our performance expectations.

Installation

Our team began by installing the hardware in place - servers, storage, and networking equipment. They set up a smart-rack data center that met the cooling and power requirements while being compact and efficient. The next step was configuring the HCI software on the installed hardware to create a unified platform for managing computing, storage, and networking resources.

We then installed the virtualization software(VMware vCloud Suite) to manage the virtual machine. Security is paramount. Our team installed firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and access controls to achieve that.

Setting up the Private Cloud

For virtual machines to run seamlessly, the team configured the private cloud and organized the resources into pools. It led to efficient allocations and management of resources. They also implemented role-based access control to enable access only to authorized personnel.

Active-Active Data Centre for Airport Operations

To maximize business continuity, uptime, and high availability, an Active-Active data center is ideal. Let us see why.

What is an Active-Active Data Centre?

Multiple data centers simultaneously and actively serving production traffic and applications is an active-active data center setup. In this setup, all data centers are fully operational and capable of handling incoming requests and workloads in real time.

Hence, it was ideal for our application in the CIAL IT environment.

The team set up data replication and synchronization between the primary and secondary data centers to ensure real-time consistency. They also implemented load balancing and conducted rigorous failover testing.

Read more about our data centre expertise here.

Cloud Backup

Our team defined the backup policies, schedules, and retention periods and integrated the cloud backup and disaster recovery system with the HCI environment. They thoroughly tested it to ensure seamless performance once it is all deployed. We used AWS cloud for backup.

Conclusion

Netcon successfully deployed an HCI environment as per the guidelines set by CIAL. Our team migrated 60+ critical airport applications and 40TB of live volumes across two data centers with minimum downtime and zero data loss.

We installed a seamless on-site data backup solution of 80TB and an off-site cloud backup of 50TB on the AWS cloud with a dedicated leased line. We also equipped it with on-demand disaster recovery. Netcon also provides managed services for two of its data centers.

As a result, CIAL has significantly lower downtime and increased business continuity compared to the traditional IT infrastructure. The applications do not struggle as the ceiling of performance is much higher. The environment is extremely secure and meets the security guidelines set by DGCA, thanks to robust and strict security measures.

CIAL accelerated its digital transformation journey by implementing hyper-converged infrastructure for its airport IT environment. Netcon is happy to have aided this journey.

If you are considering implementing a similar overhaul, contact us.