Following
its pioneering and successful introduction of cloud computing last
year, Bahrain’s national carrier Gulf Air has once again
demonstrated its corporate social responsibility by adopting several
“green” solutions in its Information Technology infrastructure
and practices.
The
latest in these initiatives is the opening of a state-of-the-art,
energy efficient Data Centre at the airline’s headquarters by Mr
Maher Salman Al Musallam, Gulf Air Acting Chief Executive Officer.
After
a tour of the Data Centre recently, Mr. Al Musallam said, “Gulf
Air’s ‘Green IT’ initiatives follow the directives of His
Highness Shaikh Abdullah bin Hamad Al Khalifa, Personal
Representative of His Majesty The King, who has shown keen interest
in promoting green technology in Bahrain.”
Gulf
Air, as a corporate entity has been actively pursuing a ‘green
policy’ in its business functions. Whether it is cloud computing or
virtualisation, our goal is to be the pioneer in adopting “green
solutions” that would help our organisation, our country and the
environment by saving energy, cost and increasing productivity. The
modern Data Centre is a very good example of this effort,” Mr Al
Musallam concluded.
Dr
Jassim Haji, Gulf Air Director of Information Technology added, “The
fully revamped Data Centre has been redesigned with energy-efficient
blade technology and virtualisation that cuts the power requirement
by 50% and uses 30% less airflow, making it one of the most
environment-friendly IT centres in the country.”
“Similarly,
through virtualisation we have reduced a substantial number of our
physical servers resulting in 80 per cent less energy consumption.
Besides cutting down our power and cooling costs and allowing more
computing power in less space, these measures also help us to reduce
carbon emission in our environment; for example, every server
virtualized is equivalent to removing four tons of carbon dioxide
(CO2) from the environment,” Dr Haji concluded.
Gulf
Air has successfully introduced a range of innovative solutions and
practices across its IT domain – from networking to communications
systems, from desktop management to IT business support services -
which are not only environment-friendly but also prove to be cost
effective and energy efficient resulting in higher productivity.
In
recent times, Gulf Air has significantly reduced the use of hardware
materials such as cables, wires, printers, desktops, servers that
consume power, paper and time, adopted virtualisation, wireless
networking, e-ticketing, Voice-Over-Internet-Telephony (VOIP) instead
of wired telephones, and promoted recyclability and/or
biodegradability of defunct products and waste.
Forthcoming
green measures include e-form automation, SKyMeals application to
reduce meal wastage through improved analysis and planning,
introduction of wireless communications on the aircraft for “black
box” recorders and replacing magnetic tapes with electronic
recordings, online interface for information exchanges and reporting
and, Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) that removes the need for paper
based flight plans and manuals, to name a few.
