CASE STUDY
T
he Manchester Airport Group,
the UK’s premier Airport Services
and Management company,
owners and operators of Manchester, East
Midlands and London Stansted Airports,
has embarked upon an ambitious £1 billion
airport transformation programme at
Manchester Airport. The project includes a
full infrastructure transformation, delivering
state-of-the-art hybrid cloud, networks and
communications platforms. As part of this
£1 billion investment, the transformation
of Manchester Airport has seen a
significant physical and digital technology
modernisation effort, radically improving
and redesigning multiple onsite data centres.
Keysource, Global Critical Environment
Specialist, delivered highly resilient and
efficient solutions that will support the vision
to make Manchester Airport one of the top
10 airports in Europe.
The project
Underpinning the programme is the
progressive modernisation of the core IT
infrastructure. This covers the full IT stacks
including application, compute, data centre,
network and communication. Essential to
the unified upgrade of the IT infrastructure
was the data centre design completed by
Keysource in partnership with MAG IT and
other MAG stakeholders. Working together
from the early phases was critical to ensure
every level of the stack would complement
each other and work towards an integrated
efficient and resilient service.
Central to this design was the on-premise
data centre estate which comprises of
hundreds of comms rooms and four core
data centres. The design was a blueprint
that covered construction, electrical,
mechanical, life safety systems, structured
cabling, BMS and power monitoring. This
blueprint is now being rolled out across both
London Stansted Airport and East Midlands
Airport to ensure ease of use, maintenance,
efficiency and resilience.
Modernising the infrastructure from the
ground up with a blueprint design replied
upon a new resilient technology infrastructure
that would be key to the success of the
programme. The decision was made to
implement an on-premises data solution
driven by a need and desire for control,
security and latency as part of a wider hybrid
strategy. The project highlights included:
• Construction of the physical rooms
• Electrical resilience with N+1 diverse
power to the cabinets
• Mechanical efficiency and resilience with
OUR VISION IS TO
BE THE PREMIER
AIRPORT
SERVICES AND
MANAGEMENT
COMPANY.
a highly efficient N+1 cooling solution
• Environmentally friendly gaseous
suppression systems
• Highly secure, fully integrated access
control systems
The challenge
The airport contributes £7 billion to the
UK economy every year and so the impact
of any downtime or issues could be
extremely damaging both financially and
reputationally. The modernisation project
was successfully deployed across a live
airport, handling 29 million passengers a
year, where any downtime or impact to IT
services would directly affect flights, airport
operations, revenue and passengers.
To provide the millions of passengers that
use the airport every year with facilities that
www.intelligentcio.com
INTELLIGENTCIO
59