Aussie flash milestone as Tigerair picks local Pure Storage partner

Harbour IT will migrate Tigerair onto flash storage on its private cloud.

The deal came after Harbour beat rivals bidders Brennan IT and Blue Apache in a tender for the airline's managed services.

Steve Evans, Harbour IT's Victorian general manager, told CRN: "We won the tender for service desk and end user support to staff. They have about 130 desktop users in Australia."

After the win, the discussion turned to infrastructure, with Tigerair adding its cloud hosting to the relationship.

The work came up for tender after Virgin acquired 60 percent of Singapore-based Tigerair in July; the airline was rebranded Tigerair Australia.

Harbour IT is currently migrating one of the airline's applications to its cloud, which is hosted in the Equinix data centre in Sydney, with disaster recovery in Melbourne.

The rest of the infrastructure will migrate over coming weeks.

Tigerair Australia’s IT program manager, Chris Panagiotidis, said: "The move to Harbour IT’s cloud-based environment is a big step forward and will transition Tigerair Australia’s existing IT infrastructure into a highly available tier one operation.

"The change will deliver greater reliability and improve operational efficiencies within the overall business whilst reducing infrastructure costs."

The project currently does not include Tigerair's website, but Steve Evans said Harbour IT would look at this work in future, adding that the MSP's credentials include hosting the websites for some banks.

Flash fix

The win is particularly significant because it marks one of the most high-profile Australian companies to switch to flash storage.

Harbour IT was one of the first Australian resellers of Pure Storage, and was recently awarded a gold partnership.

The managed service provider pitches flash as its premium offering, alongside its Cisco UCS FlexPod solution.

The flash solution is still price-competitive, said Evans. "It is a premium offering but we have been able to offer it without pricing ourselves out of the marketplace. We compete with guys selling spinning disk. We have a couple of banks excited to migrate to flash."

Pure Storage was established in 2009. Its executives include founder John Colgrove, a founding engineer of Veritas Software, which merged with Symantec in 2005, and chief executive Scott Dietzen, who was president of Zimbra when its was acquired by VMware in 2010. Pure Storage president David Hatfield was also part of Veritas.

The vendor is currently in a legal dispute over allegations it tried to steal EMC's intellectual property.

[Related: Pure Storage launches in Australia]