FOCUS COLO UPDATE
Issue 18, October/November
FOCUS UPDATE: COLO
in consultancy and application services, other colocation and managed hosting providers have evolved with particular vertical market expertise and now want to leverage this expertise to grow their colocation footprint.
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Lufthansa Systems was born from the requirement of the German national airline to find a better way to run its own IT systems. When it split from its parent company in 1995, the company started to look around for additional revenues and turned to the sector it knew best.
Today it has 200 airline and travel customers, and another 100 or so from various industries, such as energy, most of which are based in its home market and near neighbours Austria and Switzerland. Bardo Werum, head of data centers at Lufthansa Systems, says across the industry: “In general, we are allowed to sell to everyone.”
The firm still derives most of its revenue from the airline and travel industry, including running the systems for its parent company. It is focused on airline applications across the whole airline business process — from check-in to flight planning, navigation, charting and revenue management — and delivers these from its owned and managed infrastructure in six data center locations.
INSIDE THE DATA CENTER
From its main hub in Kelsterbach, Germany, Lufthansa Systems is stretching its wings to the US, the UK and Asia. The latest site to open is just north of London, where the company is putting in its own racks to its standard design, from there serving its portfolio or airline applications.
The UK data center will have direct connection to the German data center which will provide disaster recovery. In fact, there are two data centers near Frankfurt that provide mutual failover and disaster recovery for the Lufthansa Group applications. Within the data centers, these are housed separately from Lufthansa System’s other service clients.
The main Kesterbach data center is mostly a Tier 3+ layout. The second data center is for redundancy. Within the German data center, a key design difference is the 2m-high sub floor, which Bardo Werum, head of data centers, says aides cooling and maintenance in areas such as cable management.
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Werum says, from a data center layout, it doesn’t do cabling on the racks. “We can walk through the double floor to do maintenance work.‘“
From an IT perspective Lufthansa Systems is moving to the cloud. Its infrastructure is Microsoft, VMware, Linux, NetApp and Cisco.
“We are using the same components our customers are using. For us it is always better to use mass production components in X86 servers instead of vendor-specific modules. The risk is lock-in.”
“We have two strategic platforms. We have the Microsoft platform and the other is VMware with Red Hat. We compare cost-per-unit on the different platforms that challenges them both. We like to be independent.“
hile some of the major colocation providers such as Equinix, Savvis and Sungard say they are investing heavily
LUFTHANSA OPTS FOR APPS APPROACH Part of the German airline group Lufthansa Systems specializes in vertical market applications for its colocation and hosting offering. By Ambrose McNevin
LUFTHANSA SYSTEMS Major lines of business:
1. Providing IT systems to the Lufthansa Group
2. Worldwide airline customers, including Swiss Air, BMI and Air Canada
3. Industrial customers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland
Major data centers
Kelsterbach, Germany x 2; Welwyn, London; Dallas, US; Singapore
The German data centers consist of 6,800 sq m of white space built to take 10MW
Lufthansa: Flying the flag for data centers
Its main site in Kelsterbach, Germany near Frankfurt, has two sites and it recently opened a London colocation site and facilities in Dallas in the US and Singapore.
What has changed recently is that where customers once asked for licences, today, in the age of the cloud, there is less emphasis on licencing servers and more on certifications and qualifications.
There is a dramatic shift in hosting, according to Werum, from not simply buying licences but getting everything hosted in a known environment. “For example, Payment Card Industry (PCI) is now a specific requirement for airlines because of the advent of
buying. From a PCI-compliance perspective,
customers ask for more than a licence — they also need an end-to-end service.” It is this application focus that it believes differentiates it in the market.
Everyone wants cloud, but companies also want to know their data is not floating around the world. Hence, Lufthansa Systems’ opening of new data centers. The infrastructure footprint will grow from establishing a small colocation presence in each territory.
online ticket
“Among the many strengths we have is that the technology applications we develop and use mean we can serve more customers. For example, in the airline portfolio, we use SAP and have expertise in reservations and accounting, HR and financials,” Werum says. n
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