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,
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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.”
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