download.microsoft.comdownload.microsoft.com/.../PPL_WindowsServer2012_CS.docx · Web viewOil and gas producer Pakistan Petroleum Limited (PPL) is one of the largest state-owned enterprises

Pakistan Petroleum Protects IT Systems from Disaster by Using Microsoft Private Cloud

OverviewCountry or Region: PakistanIndustry: Manufacturing—Oil and gas

Customer ProfileOil and gas producer Pakistan Petroleum Limited (PPL) is one of the largest state-owned enterprises in Pakistan. The Karachi-based firm produces 20 percent of the country’s natural gas supplies.

Business SituationPPL wanted to strengthen business continuity by better protecting its data center from disasters. It also wanted to introduce more automation into its IT procedures to speed IT service delivery.

SolutionPPL used Windows Server 2012 and Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 to create a private cloud environment that enables rapid delivery of IT services and rapid disaster recovery.

Benefits Reinstate business systems in minutes

in event of a disaster Deliver servers to business in minutes

versus days Reduce IT operations work by 70

percent, freeing IT staff to focus on new projects

“With our Microsoft private cloud, we can reinstate business systems in nine minutes versus the nine hours previously required. This is critical, considering the part of the world in which we operate.”

Mirza Anwar Hussain, General Manager of IT, Pakistan Petroleum Limited

Pakistan Petroleum Limited (PPL) needed to ensure greater continuity of IT systems that the business depends on to manage well production and provide communication among geographically dispersed employees and company partners. PPL used the Windows Server 2012 Datacenter operating system and Microsoft System Center 2012 with Service Pack 1 to build a private cloud environment that provides rapid disaster recovery and IT service delivery. Starting business systems in a disaster recovery location now takes just nine minutes versus the nine hours previously required. Configuring new servers takes 10 to 15 minutes rather than three to seven days. Because it can now automate many IT processes, the IT staff has reduced its maintenance and operations work by 70 percent and has more time to focus on new projects that make the business more competitive.

SituationA petroleum engineer sits in the air-conditioned office of the Sui gas field, hunched over his computer. He glances at his watch; he has 20 minutes left to complete the daily production report and submit it to his boss in Karachi, 1,400 kilometers away. He types the final numbers into the company’s production planning system and is about to shut down for the day when his screen freezes. The machine has failed. Again. Who knows when it will be restored? The deadline missed, he stares out the window at the heat rising off the 102-degree desert sand stretching in every direction.

Keep Servers Safe“Many of our employees are working in remote locations, and their only connection to the rest of the business is their computer,” says Mirza Anwar Hussain, General Manager of IT, Pakistan Petroleum Limited. “When our computer systems fail, our employees are frustrated and unproductive.”

Established in the 1950s under the name Burmah Oil Company, Pakistan Petroleum Limited (PPL) is a major supplier of natural gas, liquefied petroleum gas, and crude oil. PPL operates six producing fields across Pakistan and has a working interest in 15 partner-operated fields. Daily gas production of PPL is about 1 billion cubic feet of gas per day, which supplies more than 20 percent of Pakistan’s total gas production. PPL is headquartered in Karachi and employs 2,700 people.

Even employees in the company’s Karachi headquarters were not immune to frequent computer failures, though a server failure was the least of their worries. Working in the city’s Red Zone, which houses important government and commercial buildings, Karachi-based employees live in an atmosphere which is frequently disturbed by demonstrations.

The PPL IT staffers are among these employees. The company’s main data center in Karachi is reinforced by a second data center 10 kilometers away, where the most critical business systems could run if the Karachi data center is down. However, it took nine hours to get IT services up and running in the second location—a dangerously long time for a business that depends as much on the flow of information as oil and gas. PPL management and the company’s many partners and stakeholders want daily updates on well production and project status.

Further, PPL management requires IT disaster recovery drills twice a year to ensure that its recovery systems are working and its staff prepared. These drills took some production systems offline for eight hours—almost as detrimental to the business as enduring an actual disaster.

Help IT Staff Help the BusinessIn addition to wanting to improve business continuity, PPL wanted to improve IT efficiency. The relatively small IT staff spent the majority of its time deploying and maintaining servers and reacting to emergencies such as server failures, leaving little time to investigate and deploy new technologies that could make the business more efficient, innovative, and competitive. The staff had used the Hyper-V technology in the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system to virtualize servers, and it had also deployed Microsoft System Center data center solutions to automate some IT tasks such as PC software deployment.

However, even with virtualization and a central IT management tool set, there were still many manual IT processes and mundane maintenance chores that consumed the staff’s time. Consequently, it took a minimum of three days to configure servers to the business, which was simply too long. “When you have employees working in a gas field in the middle of the desert and they can’t even send an email

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“Many of our employees are working in remote locations, and their only connection to the rest of the business is their computer. When our computer systems fail, our employees are frustrated and unproductive.”

Mirza Anwar Hussain, General Manager of IT, Pakistan Petroleum Limited

message, you cannot tell them that it will take three days just to deploy a server to resolve the problem,” says Anwar A. Siddiqui, Head of IT Infrastructure in the Pakistan Petroleum IT department. “They are completely cut off from the business, and the business is completely cut off from that field.”

The PPL IT department felt that it urgently needed to modernize its data center so that it could deliver IT services faster and keep IT systems available no matter what.

SolutionPakistan Petroleum Limited turned to Microsoft for help in configuring its data centers into a private cloud environment. In this configuration, virtualized servers are managed as a single computing “fabric” that can be dynamically and automatically configured and deployed with little manual intervention. A private cloud infrastructure would help PPL further consolidate physical servers, automate IT processes, and speed service delivery. “We elected to build our private cloud with Microsoft because we had a strong relationship with Microsoft, and we already used and liked the System Center tools,” says Siddiqui.

Set Up Private Cloud PPL engaged Microsoft Services Consulting to help design and set up the cloud architecture at both data centers and upgrade to the Windows Server 2012 Datacenter operating system and Microsoft System Center 2012 with Service Pack 1 (SP1).

With a private cloud configuration, PPL was able to consolidate 60 physical servers down to 14: a cluster of 7 servers in the main data center and a second cluster of 7 at the second data center. Between the two sites, PPL has about 80 virtual machines. PPL attached a storage area network to the server clusters and implemented the Windows Server 2012 Cluster Shared Volumes feature, a failover feature that

allows any virtual machine in the cluster to access files on shared storage.

“With Windows Server 2012 Datacenter, we have access to an unlimited number of virtual machines with our existing license, which reduces costs, and we also have increased CPU power, memory capacity, and high availability, which is very important for demanding applications such as SAP and Microsoft Exchange Server,” Siddiqui says. PPL uses Dell PowerEdge M610 and M620 servers, each having 192 gigabytes of RAM.

All of the PPL applications that can be virtualized are running in the private cloud environment, including SAP, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, Microsoft SQL Server 2012, Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2, Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server, and Citrix.

Gain Extensive Automation PPL uses System Center 2012 SP1 to centrally manage the multisite cloud environment. It uses the Virtual Machine Manager component of System Center 2012 SP1 to provision and deploy virtual machines. It uses the Operations Manager component to monitor the health and performance of all physical and virtual servers, and it uses the Orchestrator component to automate manual steps with workflows.

The company uses the Service Manager component of System Center to automate incident, problem, and change management. When employees have computer problems, they submit help tickets through an online Service Manager portal and can follow the status of their problems through resolution. Additionally, by connecting Service Manager and Operations Manager, PPL can cause problems identified by Operations Manager to be automatically routed to service technicians through Service Manager,

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where they can be resolved and documented in an orderly fashion. PPL uses the Configuration Manager component of System Center to deploy software to client and server computers.

Upgrade Disaster Recovery CapabilitiesPPL gained a much improved disaster recovery solution in Hyper-V Replica, a Windows Server 2012 capability that provides storage-agnostic and workload-agnostic replication of virtual machines over IP-based networks. If a disaster occurs at its primary data center, PPL can use Hyper-V Replica to restore operations by quickly failing over the replicated services at its data center.

“With Hyper-V Replica, we can move all of our workloads to the disaster recovery site and monitor them in both locations from Virtual Machine Manager,” Siddiqui says. PPL is talking to Microsoft about using Windows Azure as a third, cloud-based disaster recovery site. Windows Azure provides compute, storage, hosting, and management services from Microsoft data centers.

PPL will be able to use Hyper-V Replica to perform disaster recovery drills much faster than was previously possible and with no impact to production workloads.

BenefitsPakistan Petroleum Limited has been able to bolster its disaster preparedness and improve the speed at which it can deliver IT services to the business by creating a Microsoft private cloud environment. The IT department can reinstate business systems in nine minutes versus nine hours and can deliver servers in about 15 minutes versus three days. Increasing IT capability through software frees the company’s small IT staff from onerous maintenance chores so that it has more time to work on new solutions.

Reinstate Business Systems in Minutes in the Event of a DisasterWith its Microsoft private cloud environment, PPL can ensure uninterrupted business continuity in the face of routine server failures or catastrophic data center loss. “Even though our wells continue to pump oil and gas when our IT systems are down, our internal communications and administrative systems have to be available around the clock because our work force is scattered across the country and we work with so many partners,” Hussain says. “Our fields run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and our management and stakeholders want continuous production updates. With our Microsoft private cloud, we can ensure uninterrupted communications.”

If anything catastrophic should happen to the primary data center, the IT department can get all IT services—rather than just a few—running immediately in the second data center. “With our Microsoft private cloud, we can reinstate business systems in nine minutes versus the nine hours previously required,” Hussain says. “This is critical, considering the part of the world in which we operate. Without email, financial systems, SharePoint Server, and other IT services, the business is unable to function.”

Deliver IT Services to the Business in Minutes Versus DaysWhereas it used to take the IT department a minimum of three days—and as long as a week—to provision a server, today it takes only 10 to 15 minutes—less if there’s an available virtual machine in the private cloud “pool.” “When we are working with business teams and cannot supply their needs, they become very frustrated,” Siddiqui says. “By using all the automated efficiencies provided by System Center 2012 SP1, we can promptly deliver servers to our developers so that they can troubleshoot and fix problems with our production systems and create new solutions faster.”

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“Our fields run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and our management and stakeholders want continuous production updates. With our Microsoft private cloud, we can ensure uninterrupted communications.”

Mirza Anwar Hussain, General Manager of IT, Pakistan Petroleum Limited

Reduce IT Operations Work by 70 Percent, Freeing IT Staff to Focus on New ProjectsBy automating mundane IT maintenance tasks, the PPL IT department has been able to free up staff time for higher-value projects that help PPL be more successful. For example, by using Service Manager, help-desk, ticket resolution is improved by almost 40 percent, and the IT department can better monitor incident trends, track incident resolution progress, and document resolutions for later reference.

”Operations work previously consumed nearly all of our staff’s time,” Siddiqui says. “By using System Center 2012 SP1, we’ve reduced our operations work by 70 percent and freed our staff to work on new projects that add more value to the business.” These include improving existing services and linking Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, and Microsoft Lync Server to improve collaboration. Relieving staffers of routine server maintenance work has also improved staff morale, because they are enhancing their skills and growing professionally rather than resolving the same issues again and again.

Even though reducing capital costs was not a focus of the move to private cloud, PPL consolidated its physical server count from 50 to 14, which reduces maintenance costs by 52 percent.

“With the business more dependent than ever on IT systems, it is more critical than ever that these systems remain running all the time,” says Hussain. “With our Microsoft private cloud, we can keep our IT infrastructure running around the clock, as our business does, and deliver services as quickly as the business needs them.”

Transform the data centerThe hybrid cloud from Microsoft transforms the data center by extending existing investments in skills and technology with public cloud services and a common set of management tools. With an on-premises infrastructure connected to the Windows Azure platform, you can deliver services faster and scale up or down quickly to meet changing needs.

For more information about transforming the data center, go to:www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/cloud-os/modern-data-center.aspx

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“By using System Center 2012 SP1, we’ve reduced our operations work by 70 percent and freed our staff to work on new projects that add more value to the business.”

Anwar A. Siddiqui, Head of IT Infrastructure, IT Department, Pakistan

Petroleum Limited

For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about Pakistan Petroleum Limited products and services, visit the website at: www.ppl.com.pk

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This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published January 2014

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Windows Server 2012 Datacenter− Microsoft System Center 2012 SP1

Technologies− Hyper-V

Services− Microsoft Services Consulting

Hardware Dell PowerEdge M610 and M620 servers