Global Airports Group, daa, Flies through COVID-19 Turbulence with HPE GreenLake

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) today announced that daa, the Ireland-based global airports group, has selected the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform for a major performance and capacity upgrade to its mission critical operational services. All of the airport operators ‘Gold Services’ – passenger and baggage handling, security systems, business intelligence, and retail operations – have migrated to the HPE GreenLake platform running from daa’s two data centers. This significant upgrade was achieved with no upfront investment and on a pay-as-you-go model, which helped daa manage, predict, and control costs and spend during the pandemic.

daa is a global airports and travel retail group headquartered at Dublin Airport with operations in 16 countries. It owns and manages Dublin and Cork airports, the two largest airports in the Republic of Ireland that welcomed a combined 35.5 million passengers in 2019, as well as operating travel retail outlets in Europe, North America, the Middle East, India and Asia-Pacific. Prior to the HPE GreenLake platform migration, daa’s reliable estate of HPE servers and storage was reaching end of life and, although performance was still good, they needed to prepare for the next generation. The airport would grind to a halt if the mission critical services running on these systems were down for even a few minutes, so getting this upgrade right was absolutely vital.

Following the impact of the pandemic, capital funding for all projects, including IT infrastructure replacement, was facing significant challenges. By choosing the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform this problem was taken away and the daa team didn’t need to make a business case for capital investment in servers and storage. With HPE GreenLake, daa could achieve significant cost savings as they did not have to make any upfront investment and are only required to pay for what they use. This pay-as-you-go model truly came into its own during the pandemic, as it removed the need for ongoing lifecycle replacements and upgrades, which typically bring ongoing capital expense costs.

“During this period where passenger numbers dropped from 115,000 to under 10,000 per day, every cent of capital that we were spending was being closely scrutinized, but with HPE GreenLake that whole headache was removed,” said Padraic Doyle VP Technology at daa. “Although the primary driver was cost savings, the performance of the systems has exceeded our expectations and was an unexpected bonus. HPE GreenLake brings us many of the benefits of using a public cloud service, without some of the risks which are less palatable to us, such as latency, security and an increased dependency on external networks. Another really nice benefit of the HPE GreenLake platform is the built-in headroom that we don’t pay for, so if someone asks for additional compute for a project we can deliver that in a day or so, whereas before it would take 8-12 weeks to add the physical servers to our environment.”