Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 18 | Page 72

INDUSTRY WATCH Established in 1960, KNPC is largely responsible for maximizing the value of hydrocarbons found in Kuwait and is considered the driving force behind boosting the country’s economy. In order to reach new markets, KNPC has pioneered clean fuel projects and plans to multiply its oil refining capacity. In addition, KNPC aimed at establishing a truly connected storage infrastructure to effectively manage its data that can serve as a competitive advantage in this era of massive oil-price fluctuations. To meet this objective, KNPC deployed Dell EMC’s VMAX3, VNX unified storage arrays and Vplex Metro to enhance data storage utilization and effectively manage traditional and next generation business applications. Supplementing its efforts to create an agile storage environment, KNPC deployed Dell EMC’s NetWorker, Data Domain and Avamar to create an integrated backup and archiving infrastructure to fuel its data availability and recovery performance. “IMPLEMENTATION OF THE WHOLE PROJECT TOOK 9 MONTHS, WHICH INCLUDES REPLACEMENT AND UPGRADE TO THE STORAGE, BACKUP, ARCHIVE AND NETWORK ARCHITECTURE WITHIN THE STORAGE AREA IN KNPC. Al Duaij stated “Implementation of the whole project took 9 months, which includes replacement and upgrade to the storage, backup, archive and network architecture within the storage area in KNPC. First and foremost, 72 INTELLIGENTCIO implementing a disaster avoidance strategy that is based on active-active datacenters using Dell EMC VPLEX, VNX 5800, VMAX 100K, VMware, Oracle Virtualization (OVM), and stretched vLAN across both sites is highly innovative. Secondly, we have implemented a VPLEX Metro design that makes our production site (Head office) and our disaster recovery site (MAA Refinery) function by and large as one active site.’’ When discussing how the implementation was achieved Al Duaij added “The back end storage runs on VNX 5800 or VMAX 100K and they are active-active using Vplex distributed luns. Vplex Witness at the 3rd site monitors the active-active Vplex and takes appropriate actions based on the failure scenarios. The data is then replicated to the 3rd site using SRM for some of the applications. And, by running VMware or Oracle Virtualization (OVM) on these hosts we could create VMs for our critical systems that are active on both sites, which helps us avoid a disaster even if a site completely fails.” www.intelligentcio.com