Virgin Blue in June 2010 introduced a check-in system called New Skies for its Australian operations. Furthermore, the vendor for New Skies, Navitaire, had convinced Virgin Blue to spend $10 million on this upgrade to the New Skies system. At 8 am on Sunday 26 September a hardware failure at Navitaire’s servers resulted in the New Skies system being unable to handle customer check-ins at airports nationally, as well as the web check-in service. The net result for the next two days was that more than 100 flights had to be cancelled affecting over 50 000 passengers. Interestingly, the contractual arrangements with Navitaire clearly stated that the system would be backed up by a parallel “disaster recovery system” within three hours, in reality it did not work for another 21 hours. The Sydney Morning Herald (28 September 2010) claimed that Navitaire told Virgin Blue on the day the system crashed, that the back-up would be working within three hours. In the end to reduce the impact on their reputation, Virgin Blue reimbursed passengers for taxis and paid 1000 passengers for accommodation worth $220 a night and provided them with a free flight. Navitaire undertook an analysis of what caused the problem and in their initial report stated that: “the solid-state disk server infrastructure used to host Virgin Blue’s applications failed. This in turn crashed the airline’s internet booking, reservations, check-in and boarding systems.” Navitaire also reported that the original failure had been found “relatively quickly” but a decision to attempt to repair it “proved less than fruitful and also contributed to the delay in switching to the recovery system.” IT industry observers questioned why only Virgin Blue, out of 70 airlines using Navitaire, had major outages. It should be noted that this was the second crash for the system since Virgin’s $10 million upgrade three months ago. Jetstar and Tiger Airlines reported that they both use Navitaire and said they had robust systems in place to deal with IT failures.

Question - At the conversion stage, what four (4) options are available, which would you have recommended and why?