Hactl chooses Brocade for data center operations

BANGALORE: Hong Kong Air Cargo Terminals (Hactl) has deployed next-generation Brocade Fibre Channel storage networking switching solutions to support its data center operations over the next five years.

The Brocade DCX 8510 Backbones, implemented by Brocade partner Hitachi Data Systems, would enable Hactl to re-architect its storage network, which would help reduce its operating costs, a release said.

Hactl serves more than 100 airlines at Hong Kong International Airport from SuperTerminal 1, the world's largest multilevel air cargo terminal, with the capacity to handle up to 3.5 million tonnes of air cargo each year.

At the heart of SuperTerminal 1's operation is COSAC-Plus, a new generation of air cargo management system. The system enables more than 4,000 users from airlines, freight forwarders, and related government departments to monitor and manage air cargo handled by Hactl, typically performing close to a million transactions on a daily basis.

"The new Brocade SAN switches enable us to consolidate tier 1 and tier 2 storage capacity into virtualized resource pools that are available to our production, disaster recovery, and development domains. In essence our storage environment is more simple and flexible," said John Lee, Senior IT Operations Manager at Hong Kong Air Cargo Terminals.

The Brocade solution was designed and implemented by Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Professional Services.

"Hactl is a great illustration of the benefits of SAN simplification and virtualization," said Franklin Sze, Regional Director for Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau, Brocade. "By leveraging advanced Brocade SAN fabric technology, Hactl's SuperTerminal 1 has gone from having essentially two separate multi-layered SANs that were complex to operate, to having a single-layer storage fabric that spans the whole terminal. This makes life much simpler for the system administrators and enables Hactl to use its storage resources far more efficiently, which increase its return on investment."

With the new Brocade SAN fabric in place, Hactl plans to upgrade its tier 1 and tier 2 storage arrays to fully exploit Gen 5 Fibre Channel performance. Lee said that Hactl is also looking at leveraging the Brocade DCX 8510 Backbones' integrated metro and global SAN extension capabilities to migrate from the company's existing tape-based backup system to backups in the cloud.