Philippine Airlines Selects IBM Storage

IBM announced that Philippine Airlines (PAL), the country’s flagship carrier and Asia’s first commercial airline, will upgrade and consolidate its information infrastructure to an IBM System Storage solution to support the airline’s round–the–clock, global business environment.

With a fleet of young and modern aircraft that travels to 31 foreign cities and 30 domestic points, PAL has become one of the most respected airlines worldwide today. As PAL launches new routes to both domestic and international destinations, it realized it needed to upgrade its current information infrastructure. The increased workloads on PAL’s Airline Control Systems (ALCS) and other business systems required better performance and superior throughput of the storage systems to run more efficiently. PAL also required an off-site fallback storage for business continuity and disaster recovery.

Under the agreement signed in September, PAL will replace three different multi-vendor disk systems with an IBM storage solution consisting of the IBM System Storage Turbo DS8300 and IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center management software that helps to centralize and automate storage tasks associated with storage systems.

“An upgrade of our existing mainframe system will improve the response time, shorten the processing time for the Airline Control Systems (ALCS) based systems, and consolidate all present and projected storage requirements of our mission-critical applications," said Joffrey Foronda, Manager for Infrastructure and Storage Management, PAL. "Furthermore, we can build an information infrastructure with which we will be able to deliver improved service levels, reduce business risks, and manage the information explosion effectively."

IBM was chosen over other storage system providers due to the superior capabilities of the DS8000 Turbo and IBM’s record of excellent support and service. This year, PAL celebrates the 25th anniversary of the Philippine Airlines Commitment to Excellence to Reservations Systems on IBM System z.

“We are delighted to be chosen as PAL’s partner to help address its increasing business needs," said James Velasquez, Country General Manager, IBM Philippines. "With the tremendous scalability, broad server support and flexible virtualization capabilities of the DS8000 Turbo, PAL can simplify the storage environment which can help manage the airline’s exponential growth and at the same time reduce its operational complexity and costs.”

IBM will work together with FRITZ & MACZIOL, a global IBM Premier Partner, in the implementation of this project.