MANILA, Philippines -- Philippine Airlines is upgrading its storage systems to support its airline control systems, computer giant IBM said.

IBM said the country's flag carrier is also consolidating its information systems after adding more domestic and international flights.

PAL, owned by business tycoon Lucio Tan, now operates flights to 31 cities abroad and 30 domestic points.

The company is deploying a storage solution that includes IBM's System Storage Turbo DS8300 and proprietary software that helps to centralize and automate storage tasks associated with storage systems.

Both companies, however, did not disclose how much was invested in the upgrade.

"An upgrade of our existing mainframe system will improve the response time, shorten the processing time for airline control systems (ALCS) based systems," said Joffrey Foronda, PAL's infrastructure and storage management manager, in a statement.

The upgrade also consolidates all present and projected storage requirements to power mission-critical applications, Foronda said.

The deployment includes an offsite fallback storage for business continuity and disaster recovery.

Fritz and Macziol, a global IBM partner, is currently working with IBM on this PAL project.