Tigerair Australia signs managed services deal

Tigerair’s Australian operation will become one of the highest profile businesses in the country to make the switch to flash storage.

The discount airline has signed a multi-year managed services agreement with Harbour IT covering service desk and end-user support for the airline’s 130 local staff.

The deal follows a 60 percent acquisition of the discount airline by Virgin.

As a part of the deal, Harbour IT is currently migrating one of the airline's applications to a hosted service in the Equinix data centre in Sydney, with disaster recovery connectivity to a site in Melbourne.

The remainder of the infrastructure will migrate over coming weeks.

Tigerair Australia’s IT program manager, Chris Panagiotidis said the move to a cloud-based environment represents "a big step forward and will transition Tigerair Australia’s existing IT infrastructure into a highly available tier one operation.

"The change will deliver greater reliability and improve operational efficiencies within the overall business whilst reducing infrastructure costs."

The project currently does not include Tigerair's website, but Steve Evans, Harbour IT's Victorian general manager said Harbour IT would look at this work in future, adding that the MSP's credentials include hosting the websites for some banks.

Flash fix

The managed service provider pitches high-performance flash as its premium offering, alongside its Cisco UCS-based FlexPod solution.

 "We have been able to offer it without pricing ourselves out of the marketplace," Evans said. "We compete with guys selling spinning disk. We have a couple of banks excited to migrate to flash."

Pure Storage was established in 2009. Its executives include founder John Colgrove, a founding engineer of Veritas Software, which merged with Symantec in 2005, and chief executive Scott Dietzen, who was president of Zimbra when its was acquired by VMware in 2010.

The vendor is currently in a legal dispute over allegations it tried to steal EMC's intellectual property.