Largest Energy Company in the Southern Hemisphere experiences cloud economics with enterprise-class performance from SimpliVity’s hyperconverged solution
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Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- OmniCube CN-2000
- SimpliVity OmniCube
- Data Virtualization Platform (DVP)
Tech Stack
- Microsoft SQL Server
- Windows Remote Desktop
- VMware VMs
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
- Customer Satisfaction
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Applicable Industries
- Oil & Gas
- Renewable Energy
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Maintenance
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
The customer is the fourth largest Oil and Gas Company in the world, as well as an integrated energy company with a presence in 29 countries. They are involved in oil and renewable energy acquisition and have locations globally. The company uses a variety of applications, including Microsoft SQL Server, Windows Remote Desktop, and mission-critical applications to monitor buoys and wave patterns, as well as other client-server and third-party applications. The company operates on ships located 200 miles off-shore and has a central data center in Texas. The company was facing challenges with their legacy infrastructure, which was taking up too much space, consuming too much power, and not providing an efficient solution for off-site backups. They were seeking a technology refresh and a solution that could deliver best-in-class disaster recovery capabilities.
The Challenge
The fourth largest Oil and Gas Company in the world as well as integrated energy company with a presence in 29 countries was faced with a major problem: their legacy infrastructure could no longer service all their mission-critical applications. Applications such as Microsoft SQL server, Remote Desktop servers, applications to monitor buoys and wave patterns, and other third-party applications were not running in an optimized or secure state. For disaster recovery, the company used tape backup which was extremely slow and provided no solution for off-site backups for their ships, 200 miles off-shore. Also the existing infrastructure was taking up too much space in the limited room onboard the ships. This Oil and Gas Company sought a technology refresh and a solution that could deliver best-in-class DR capabilities. The Oil and Gas Company had been using six HP servers, NetApp storage, and VSAT connectivity to host ten VMware VMs. The infrastructure was consuming two full racks on the resource-constrained Floating, Production, Storage, and Offloading (FPSO) ship where power, space, and cooling were premiums. This design had been in place for six years. Not only was the rigid, legacy infrastructure inefficient, the architecture also lacked the capabilities and agility needed to support new application requirements their business demanded.
The Solution
The Oil and Gas Company discovered SimpliVity's OmniCube solution at VMworld 2013. They found that SimpliVity's Data Virtualization Platform (DVP) was the solution to their disaster recovery and critical infrastructure needs. The company purchased 3 CN-2000s, two of which were placed on the ship, and one was stationed at the central data center in Texas. The installation and onboarding were completed within a couple of hours, with all ten VMs on the ship non-disruptively moved over to the OmniCubes. Their two full racks were reduced to one, reducing their power and cooling costs. With this unique setup, the Oil and Gas Company effectively leveraged the OmniCube systems to decrease space, complexity, and cost while increasing productivity and efficiency. The OmniCube’s ability to deduplicate, compress, and optimize data has eased the Oil and Gas Company’s data center workloads. The unique capability is foundational to enhancing backup and off-site data protection—a pressing concern for a remote oil refinery with limited access to IT support.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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