In order to meet the challenges of a burgeoning international airline business, and to overcome limitations in the scope of business functionality, Saudi Airlines - the national carrier for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has turned to Sun Microsystems for a complete systems upgrade to meet its growth requirements. Needing a massive infrastructure upgrade to ensure business continuity to facilitate its current and future growth, Saudi Airlines deployed SAP solutions for a comprehensive ERP solution to integrate and optimize their corporate, marketing, operations and e-Business Systems. To manage and run its business applications, the airline required a robust IT infrastructure to ensures smooth information exchange, reduce downtime, and guarantee 24/7 availability. Sun's highly available infrastructure platform including M8000 and T5210 servers, V490 and V425 storage and back-up solutions will be deployed in three phases to efficiently run the SAP solution. Sun's system infrastructure consists of a consolidation plan to cover the architectural design for the SAP ERP environment in hardware partitions and clusters with storage replication for the airlines' disaster recovery site. “Growth has been continuous for Saudi Airlines since its inception; from a single aircraft in 1945 to more than 139 aircraft today and serves more than 13 million passengers every year. To support this growth, it became important to have the right technological infrastructure to ensure business continuity,” said Muhammed Al-Bakri, ERP project director and chief, Systems Engineering and Technology, Saudi Airlines. “Sun's solution for SAP was convincing; Sun provided an integrated tested solution that can be deployed quickly enough to help reduce cost and risk, improve availability, scalability, security, flexibility, and manageability. The solution is performance-driven, ensures business continuity and has the capacity to accommodate a wide variety of business applications.” A critical feature that made Sun Saudi Airlines' IT provider of choice was the fact that its SAP portal was developed using JAVA. Sun proposed the utilization of a smaller server- the T5120 - to run the SAP applications, compared to the M8000 that would be used to run the airlines' Oracle applications. Sun also incorporated the airlines existing hardware to optimize resource utilization, and upgraded the airline's storage from mid range to an enterprise level to cope with increasing data and operations. Sun will share critical know-how and on-site training in its ongoing efforts to help system administrators at Saudi Airlines get the most out of its Sun solution. “Sun is proud to be a part of Saudi Airlines' success story. Sun's is helping Saudi Airlines transform its IT department into a state-of-the-art, modern infrastructure and arming it with the right solutions to drive its growth.” said Jamal Said, district sales manager for Sun Microsystems in Saudi Arabia. “The solution gives it a competitive edge and will scale to meet the airlines' growth and take it from strength to strength. It will enable Saudi Airlines to manage mission critical applications, and boost business continuity, while lowering cost of ownership and a reduced time to production readiness.” __
