British Airways flying high with storage monitoring

British Airways is aiming to reduce the risk of downtime on its critical business systems by installing SAN monitoring software.

The company will use tech from Computer Associates (CA) which provides early warning if the functioning of the SAN is under threat.

The company's SAN supports much of its infrastructure, including finance, catering, engineering, cargo and the ba.com ticketing information service.

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Dave Smith, infrastructure manager for BA, told silicon.com: "It helps us monitor the components in our SAN. The main driver was one of operation integrity."

At present, Smith explained, any drop in SAN performance could go unnoticed, resulting in a loss of service. He said: "Failures could happen and we might not notice for a period of time."

As part of a five-year deal with CA, BA will also use capacity-planning software that will allow the company to reduce the total cost of storage.

Using CA's Storage Resource Manage tool, BA will be able to access information to select the most cost-effective storage hardware; this is expected to contribute a 10-20 per cent saving on disk purchases.

In another cost-saving move, the airline will only pay for the storage it actually uses through a capacity licence agreement with CA.