Gulf Air, the national carrier of Bahrain, has notched up huge savings through the adoption of several 'green' solutions in its information technology infrastructure and practices, the airline's top IT official said.

"The new state-of-the-art, energy-efficient data centre has been redesigned with energy-efficient blade technology and virtualisation that cuts the power requirement by 50 per cent and uses 30 per cent less airflow, making it one of the most environment-friendly IT centres in the country," Gulf Air director of information technology Dr Jassim Haji told our sister publication, the Gulf Daily News.

"Similarly, through virtualisation we have reduced a substantial number of our physical servers resulting in 80 per cent less energy consumption.

"Besides cutting down our power and cooling costs and allowing more computing power in less space, these measures also help us to reduce carbon emission in our environment; for example, every server virtualised is equivalent to removing four tonnes of carbon dioxide from the environment," Dr Haji said.

"We have introduced a range of innovative solutions and practices across IT domain - from networking to communications systems, from desktop management to IT business support services - which are not only environment-friendly but also prove to be cost-effective and energy-efficient resulting in higher productivity.

"The airline has significantly reduced the use of hardware such as cables, wires, printers, desktops, servers that consume power, paper and time, adopted virtualisation, wireless networking, e-ticketing, voice-over-Internet-telephony instead of wired telephones, and promoted recyclability and/or biodegradability of defunct products and waste.

"Forthcoming green measures include e-form automation, SKyMeals application to reduce meal wastage through improved analysis and planning, introduction of wireless communications on the aircraft for 'black box' recorders and replacing magnetic tapes with electronic recordings, online interface for information exchanges and reporting and electronic flight bag that removes the need for paper-based flight plans and manuals.

The centre located at the airline's headquarters was inaugurated by Gulf Air acting chief executive Maher Salman Al Musallam, who said, "our goal is to be the pioneer in adopting 'green solutions' that would help our organisation, our country and the environment by saving energy, cost and increasing productivity. The modern data centre is a very good example of this effort." – TradeArabia News Service