'Largest data migration in Queensland's history' complete

IT services business Interactive has helped Flight Centre's IT infrastructure take flight in what Interactive claims is the largest data migration in Queensland history.

The deal saw Flight Centre move from co-location to managed services, with Interactive taking end-to-end responsibility over the data center environment and legacy compute from IBM and Cisco, as well as Dell storage and CommVault backup.

John Hanna, Interactive director of cloud and managed services, says the deal is the largest migration in the Australian travel industry, an industry known for management of a substantial amount of data.

The data migration, completed early this month, tipped the scales at 300TB of data, 170 hosts and 1600 virtual machines.

Flight Centre partnered with Interactive in August to outsource its IT function and enable business transformation. The two companies have a longstanding business relationship dating back some 12 years, something both sides say was instrumental in the project.

"A project of this size is not undertaken without a solid foundation of trust," notes Peter Wataman, Flight Centre chief information officer.

Wataman says the company's potential to innovate was being held back by the time and resources spend on in-house infrastructure.

"We had difficulties enabling the businesses rapid growth in new markets and areas, without constantly revisiting our infrastructure solution," Wataman says.

He says Interactive offered Flight Centre a scalable platform, providing the company with more agility and flexibility to ensure IT services are delivering what the business needs, as it needs it, and even pre-empting change in some instances.

"We're excited about this journey and how IT will continue to transform Flight Centre as a business," Wataman says.

"Every organisation is pushing IT for more value – from their investments in people and their infrastructure," Hanna says.

"What we have been able to achieve is a solution enabling companies like Flight Centre to produce more with less.