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Jeddah,
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 6
May 2001
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s
International Airports Project (IAP) announced today that it has ‘gone
live’ with the implementation of a virtual storage solution from STME,
the
Middle East’s leading provider of enterprise storage solutions. With
its new storage solution, IAP now has the capacity to store, manage and
protect all of the critical data from every international and domestic
airport throughout the Kingdom, such as logistics systems, personnel
systems, airline billing systems and passenger traffic data.
The
business drivers behind IAP’s storage strategy were considerable.
In recent months, IAP assumed responsibility for domestic as well
as international airports, raising the number of IAP managed facilities
from 10 to 23. IAP
has also adopted quality assurance standards to better serve air
travellers throughout the Kingdom.
These new reponsibilities caused IAP to more than double its IT
infrastructure as well as the amount of data that IAP needed to manage,
resulting in higher costs for man-hours as well as storage space.
“With
IAP’s increased reponsibilities and commitment to customer service, we
were actually experiencing more errors and less efficiency in our
operations. IAP’s new
enterprise storage strategy from STME has now cut our costs through
greater staff productivity and a decreased margin of errors,” said Engineer
Faisal Bafadhl, IAP’s
Deputy
Director of IT.
Prior
to working with STME, IAP outlined its specific needs for a viable
storage strategy, including ease
of use, minimal manual intervention, faster data retrieval, greater data
integrity, and ease of migration. IAP
also wanted to work with a storage provider who could be vendor-neutral
to offer best-of-breed solutions, as well as provide post-sales training
and support services.
The
STME storage solution implemented by IAP includes tape technology from
STME partner StorageTek. The solution consists of a 500-slot WolfCreek
library, three 9840 tape drives and a Virtual Storage Manager (VSM).
“The
tremendous results that IAP has achieved in a short time speak for
themselves. It used to take
more than 4 hours to back-up our data, and now we’ve reduced that to
just one hour. Previously
IAP had 2,000 off-site cartridges full of mission-critical data with a
media life of only 5-years, now we have only 11, and our number of total
physical tape cartridges has shrunk from 7,000 to just 45 – an amazing
reduction of resources, with 20 years of life-time,” continued Eng.
Bafadhl.
IAP
plans to implement later phases of its STME storage strategy as their
data grows. Eng. Bafadel
added, “STME’s offering was the superior solution with far more
functionality, performance and ease of use.
We were very impressed with the professionalism shown by STME
from our initial meeting right through to installation of the system,
and IAP is continuing to benefit from STME’s highly acclaimed
post-sales hardware and software support.”
“IAP’s
enterprise storage strategy will enable the data center to produce
statistics regarding the aviation and mass transportation industry. This
data can be used to increase customer service for all of the Kingdom’s
air travellers,” noted Andrew Calthorpe, Sales Director of STME.
He added, “The data that IAP is storing through its STME
solution can help make air travel in Saudi Arabia more customer-focused
than ever before.”
About
IAP
Presidency
of Civil Aviation – International Airports Project implements the
civil aviation procedures and regulations, and organizes air traffic
within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. IAP is also responsible for the
construction, management and operation of the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia’s civil airports.
Visit
http://www.pca.gov.sa
About
STME
STME is the Middle East region's leading provider of advanced enterprise
storage solutions. With 12
offices across the region and with more than nineteen years of
experience in the Middle East, STME is able to provide its customers
with best-of-breed technology, integrated solutions and superlative
service. Visit http://www.stme.com/
For
further information, please contact:
Wallis
Marketing Consultants
T:
(971-4) 332-3225
F:
(971-4) 332-3228
E-mail:
wallismc@emirates.net.ae
Attn:
Eileen M. Wallis, Rawia G. Asali
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