CASE STUDY
The terminal in progress
combine a contemporary look and feel with
state-of-the-art services, the project team
fully understood the challenges and ensured
all risks had been mitigated within the
project programme, including:
• Airside security
• Remote airside location two miles from
the terminal buildings
• Working around live IT and electrical
services supporting countless airport
services such as baggage handling
• Live operational data centres with
complex migration strategies with
10+ stages in one facility alone,
replacing raised floor, racks, power and
containment row by row
• Limited time for out of hours switching
01:00 to 04:00 after last flight and before
first flight
• Summer moratorium/change freeze
windows for existing systems
The results
The Manchester Airport transformation
project has enabled and equipped a smarter
airport that will deliver an exceptional
customer experience going forward. The
successful delivery of light construction,
electrical, mechanical, racks and thermal
containment, fire detection and suppression,
60
INTELLIGENTCIO
structured cabling and BMS took place
around live services within a complex IT
migration strategy during limited shutdown
windows. The data centres are at the
heart of all airport operations affecting
lights, gates, passenger information and
ultimately aircraft take-off and landings.
The transformation project has seen zero
unplanned outages and delivered:
• Comprehensive critical environment
monitoring and control systems plus
detailed power monitoring systems for
capacity and energy efficiency monitoring
• 99.99% availability level through resilient
infrastructure design
• Repeatable blueprint design for all sites
• Minimised Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)
with standardised infrastructure across
all airports
Nicholas Woods, Group CIO, Manchester
Airport Group, tells us more about the
implementation process:
passengers flying through its airports every
year, which together employ over 40,000
people on site. As the largest UK owned
airport operator, we contribute over
£7 billion to the UK economy and support
over 130,000 jobs in the supply chain. Our
vision is to be the premier airport services
and management company.
From a technology perspective, I feel
incredibly lucky to be MAG’s CIO. An Airport
is like a mini city, we have shopping malls,
heavy industry in our baggage systems and
engineering divisions, police and fire services,
the UK border to secure and that’s before
you even get to the planes. There is so much
technology needed to keep the airports
operational and we are investing heavily
to make our airports more efficient and to
deliver an exceptional customer experience.
No two days are the same and it is a great
place to be.
Can you give us an overview of
company and its core objectives? Can you explain the importance
of operating with a modern IT
infrastructure and what this means
to MAG?
MAG is a leading UK airport group and
owns and operates three UK airports –
Manchester, London Stansted and East
Midlands. The group sees over 60 million The airports are critical national
infrastructure so the government, country,
our airline partners and importantly our
passengers rely on us. Manchester airport
www.intelligentcio.com