InterCity Group (NZ) Limited is a privately owned passenger transport and tourism company and operates New Zealand's largest coach transportation network. Transporting Kiwis and visitors from overseas around New Zealand for more than 30 years, InterCity Group operates two coach networks, Intercity Coachlines and Newmans Coach Lines.

InterCity CoachLines offers quality point-to-point bus transport on modern coaches at economic fares nationwide.

Newmans Coach Lines provides premium coach services between major cities and to and from New Zealand's key tourist destinations.

InterCity Coachlines proudly brings you the most comprehensive and frequent New Zealand coach travel services to destinations throughout the entire country. Over 150 services daily to more than 600 communities, towns and cities across the country.

Overview of Requirements

InterCity Group required a complete turnkey solution to replace their aging technology platform to consolidate workload whilst moving the operation to a 24x7 availability level. SAS^IT delivered the ResNet project solution to the satisfaction of Neil Green, the InterCity Group IT Manager. The solution mitigated any risks that InterCity were facing with unreliable power supplies and aging technology. The platform also provides a significant growth path to meet projected business demands with a Capacity on Demand basis.

As a very significant part of InterCity's business is transacted over the summer period, it was mission critical that a highly available infrastructure was deployed. The solution involved providing the infrastructure for the reservations systems using a complete business continuity solution architected without a single point of failure. Zero downtime was a design mantra to which SAS^IT delivered.

The planning incorporated fail-over of Internet access, and complete network & system redundancy to over-come the business downtime losses that would be otherwise incurred. The 35 seat Call-Centre operates from InterCity's Epsom location, or could potentially be dispersed to use VOIP based technologies whilst still meeting the customer contact needs.

SAS^IT solution proposed

We delivered a production instance of a mid range IBM p570 server with a N5200 SAN to house the Unix application, with a virtualised IBM Intel server to cater for the Windows & Linux back-office services sharing the SAN. This production infrastructure is housed at SAS^IT and replicated to a duplicate Business Continuity instance at InterCity's offices. The production system runs a real-time replication toolset of the Progress database, with a tested fail-over process should either site become unavailable. The primary Intel environment is run onsite at InterCity, with SAN replication to SAS^IT to deal with business continuity issues.

Part of the challenges to deploy this solution in an extremely tight timeframe included application porting from Solaris 2.6 to AIX 5.3, Progress database version upgrades and new replication software installation & testing. All of these issues were over come and the project was delivered to meet InterCity's business timeframes.

Additional Capacity on Demand has been factored into the back-end infrastructure to allow for both un- & planned business growth, as InterCity are moving from provide passenger transport services to one of New Zealand's leading tourism operators.

Outcome Delivered

Significant outcomes of the project include:-

• InterCity's customer satisfaction has improved
• unscheduled downtime significantly reduced
• access to systems is now 24x7
• business expansion plans can now be delivered on with the new infrastructure (and subsequent acquisitions have started to occur with two new businesses acquired)
• costs have reduced (when taking into account the reduction of Telecommunication costs)
• response times have improved during peak times
• error detection and problem resolution has significantly reduced (was often caused by systems outages under the prior systems environment)
• The existing disaster recovery processes meant a significant outage would have been required to fail over to the Disaster Recovery site. This site would have limited system functionality and the lack of Internet connectivity would have constrained Intercity's operations. This would have severely affected the business, as 2/3 of all bookings could not have been made, resulting in a significant loss, both in revenue and confidence.
• No DR plan for Windows office environment servers and storage existed, which would have meant a significant downtime until replacement systems were deployed
• The existing systems were inflexible to incorporate any virtualisation technologies, either in the storage or server infrastructure.

One year on....

The solution is performing as specified, delivering the performance and reliability demanded by Intercity to meet their growing business needs. The availability now provided by the system is meeting the business requirements as expected, and growth by acquisition has been accommodated without undue stress, pressure or problem. The purchase of the Kings Tours businesses in Paihia has resulted in significantly more throughput for the systems, but no outages or issues in regard to capacity.

• The new systems (Linux, AIX and Windows) are built using virtualisation technologies, for both storage and server infrastructure.
• The key measure for InterCity has been the mitigation of risk, where the business depends upon a system that is expected to operate 24x7 and provides a full business continuance solution.
• The efficiency brought by SAS^IT provides a depth of skilled staff on an ongoing basis, and an expertise in operating 24x7 mission critical systems, which InterCity would not have otherwise been able to achieve.
• This innovative leading edge solution has been successfully deployed in a manner where InterCity is now a reference site for SAS^IT.

SAS^IT has continued to be involved in additional projects since the successful implementation of the ResNet project and are continuing to work with InterCity to meet their ICT needs.

Lessons learned

Planning, project management and understanding the business requirements, in addition to the ICT requirements are all key in delivering a complex solution on time to meet the customer's expectations.