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F E A T U R E

First-Class IT Service

April 17, 2003
By Jonathan Feldman

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KISS, McCarran Style

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	In this article
	Introduction
	Keeping Busy
	KISS, McCarran Style
	Attitude Is Everything

McCarran's desktop management philosophy: "Simpler is better." The biggest deployments are, of course, at the gates and ticket counters, and for desktop management McCarran uses Arinc's tools, which load a stripped-down version of Microsoft Windows NT, with a custom shell, over the network (see CUTE diagram, page 48). The Arinc package has the agent authenticate after choosing his or her airline (see CUTE chooser, below), and CUTE then launches the appropriate emulator. The airline uses straight IP routing or gateway-protocol-conversion technology to get the session back to corporate. Straight leased lines and frame relay are also in use.

As far as network management goes, as the gigabit upgrade progresses, the associated closet and core network gear is plugged into a Computer Associates Unicenter management framework, which should be completed by August. After experiencing one prolonged network outage, management made uptime a priority. The older FDDI network was exceptionally reliable, even though various pieces of the network broke down over the years as a result of dual counter rotating rings, dual power supplies and dual switched fabrics on the backplane of the core switch. To provide the same high level of fault tolerance on the gigabit network, the closet switches (Enterasys E7s and E1s) are all dual-trunked using Spanning Tree, with backup trunks on separate cards.

Service Levels and Staffing

Airline systems manager David Bourgon's staff of eight technicians maintains about 3,000 bar-code readers and ticket printers, plus the PCs that connect to them.

"We take care of it all in-house," he says. "Traditionally this stuff is outsourced, but we do it internally, and our customers don't have to wait for service. We normally handle 50 trouble calls a day. We call the airline back within five to 15 minutes, and most problems are resolved within 30 minutes."

Compare that with phoning an off-site system integrator, staying on the phone with a helpdesk for 30 minutes, or, even worse, placing a call to headquarters in another city and waiting for someone to fly in. Bourgon says it's common for airlines to fly technicians in--makes sense, they don't have to worry about steep airfare. Problems that take longer to resolve tend to be WAN-based, with circuits back to individual airlines' headquarters. "Northwest was down for several hours yesterday when there was a circuit problem," he says.

Next Steps

• April: Thirty-eight common-use self-service (CUSS) systems due to go live in the main terminal
• May: CUSS systems to go live for off-site check-in at the Las Vegas Convention Center
• July: Backbone upgrade to Gigabit Ethernet due for completion
• December: Campuswide wireless network due for completion

The payback for the airlines that choose to participate in the airport's common-use systems: fast on-site help for local problems, making for happier and more productive agents. And that, in turn, boosts customer satisfaction.

How do Bourgon and the other IT managers keep service levels high? For one thing, the systems are redundant: They're TruUnix 64 version 5.1, Digital Equipment Alpha clusters running Oracle with failover capabilities for FIDS, Microsoft Windows 2000 clusters for LDCS, and a Novell NetWare cluster for CUTE. To standardize these, McCarran plans on transitioning to Windows 2000 once the systems are at the end of their useful lives.

What about continuity of service? Say, for instance, if there are only two people who deeply understand the Alphas, is there a rule banning them from ever getting on the same airplane? Not a problem, Bourgon says.

CUTE/FIDS Network

click to enlarge

"All eight of the technicians are versed in both the systems on the software and on the hardware," he says. "That way I always have somebody in the building who knows what they are doing. We also contract support services, obviously, for our different servers. We have support for Compaq, for the Alpha clusters and for our regular servers."

McCarran also relies on good change management, through an internal application called ISOS (information systems operation schedule). Changes are posted two weeks prior to the implementation, which gives everyone a chance to comment, says Hughes. In addition, there's a "Tenant Bulletin," which goes out via e-mail and fax and warns airlines when there's a potential change in the works. For the airport operational systems, the change window is between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. Internal (nonairline) systems have a more forgiving window, 5 p.m. to 6 a.m., plus weekends.