The Information Age Interview.(Brona Kernan, Ryanair)(Interview)

Information Age (IA): Ryanair carries some 9 million passengers a year, 90% of whom book their tickets over the Internet. Simply managing this volume of online traffic must be a significant challenge in itself. How does the company cope with managing its own corporate IT infrastructure at the same time?

Brona Kernan (BK): At Ryanair, we have three corporate offices and 71 other sites, including all the airports that we fly to. These all sit on our corporate IT network. One of the key challenges is the security of this network, because it is so dispersed, going into airports all over Europe. It's a highly secure network.

Now we find ourselves in the position where we have a lot of mission-critical systems. This year we started on a review of the IT infrastructure at our corporate head office, and decided we needed a major upgrade to meet the high-availability requirements of these systems.

IA: Why did you choose to standardise your infrastructure on Dell and EMC, above other vendors?

BK: Ryanair has long been a purchaser of Dell equipment. It started back in 1996 with desktop PCs. At the time, we perceived Dell as a very similar organisation to Ryanair, and I'd say we've probably grown up together. As Ryanair started to grow - in 1996 we were not a very large airline - Dell began to move into the server market.

So this year, after…