Gazprom Upgrades Operating System to Reduce IT Costs, Improve Business Agility
Overview
Country or Region:Russia
Industry:Manufacturing—Oil & gas
Customer Profile
Gazprom is one of the world’s largest producers of natural gas and one of the largest companies in Russia. Investgazavtomatika provides IT services to many Gazprom subsidiaries.
Business Situation
Investgazavtomatika was tasked with consolidating a sprawling Gazprom IT infrastructure, reducing IT costs, improving IT staff efficiency, accelerating server delivery, and improving disaster recovery.
Solution
Gazprom is upgrading to the Windows Server 2012 operating system to create a private cloud environment that can serve all Gazprom subsidiaries with greater speed and lower costs.
Benefits
- Reduce data center costs
- Respond faster to business needs
- Recovery faster from disasters
Dmitri Starostov, Head,IT Department, Investgazavtomatika, Gazprom
Gazprom is a large global oil and gas producer with dozens of subsidiaries. A key part of its IT organization, Investgazavtomatika, is upgrading to the Windows Server 2012 operating system and using it as a foundation for building a private cloud environment that all Gazprom subsidiaries can share. By taking advantage of the many high-availability features in Windows Server 2012 and increased virtual machine density, Gazprom can reduce server costs by 25 percent a year and greatly expand its portfolio of services and infrastructure without increasing its IT staff. With a wealth of automation features provided by Windows Server 2012 and Microsoft System Center 2012, Investgazavtomatika can deliver IT services to the business faster and help Gazprom recover from disasters in minutes instead of days.
Situation
As a global energy company, Gazprom produces a significant percentage of the world’s natural gas and is one of the largest companies in Russia. Its major business lines are geological exploration, production, transportation, storage, processing, and sales of gas and oil, in addition to generating and marketing heat and electric power. Gazprom is headquartered in Moscow and has dozens of subsidiaries around the world.
Gazprom Automatizatsia is the general system integrator for Gazprom automated management systems. Investgazavtomatika is an associated enterprise that provides IT services to many Gazprom subsidiaries. It is tasked with consolidating and standardizing the firm’s sprawling global IT holdings to reduce costs and improve efficiency and business agility. For years, each subsidiary ran its own IT operation, to better support local business needs. But the decentralized approach resulted in redundancies, high costs, and inefficiencies that hurt business agility for the parent firm.
While individual subsidiaries made progress using various technologies to virtualize their data centers, Gazprom was eager to standardize on one virtualization technology and create a private cloud environment. With such an environment, Gazprom could create a large pool of virtualized compute and storage resources that could be shared by the all the subsidiaries and dynamically configured and reallocated as needed. It would have detailed resource metering information that the Investgazavtomatika staff could use to determine which resources each subsidiary was using and bill them accordingly.
Investgazavtomatika was unable to create a private cloud, however, because the virtualization technologies available did not have the capability to create multitenant usage models. Also, the staff was so busy with routine infrastructure maintenance work—provisioning and deprovisioning virtual machines, applying updates, configuring networks, allocating storage—that it did not have time to undertake new initiatives.
“The oil and gas exploration business is very expensive and competitive,” says Mikhail Meltsin, Head of System Administration at Investgazavtomatika, Gazprom. “Hiring and training people are costly, and it’s difficult to find good IT staff. We were constantly adding servers, our capital and operating costs were rising, and we were having a hard time making progress on our consolidation and standardization efforts.”
Investgazavtomatika needed technologies that would accelerate its delivery of servers to Gazprom subsidiaries, improve the utilization of data center resources, increase staff efficiency, and maintain or improve the availability of IT services.
Solution
Gazprom was already running the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system on many of its servers and using the Hyper-V technology built into that operating system to virtualize servers for some subsidiaries. When the Investgazavtomatika staff learned about the Windows Server 2012 operating system, it realized that it would be a key technology to help centralize IT and build a true private cloud environment. “With Windows Server 2012, we could stop investing in multiple hypervisors and finally achieve software and server consolidations,” says Dmitri Starostov, Head of the IT Department at Investgazavtomatika, Gazprom.
Create a Test Environment
Gazprom joined the Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) for Windows Server 2012 and worked with a local Microsoft Services consultant to evaluate the high-availability features, increased virtualization capacity, and other improvements available in the operating system. In its proof of concept, Gazprom created Hyper-V servers in three locations—two in Moscow and another in Israel—to provide geographically dispersed, highly available services. All three sites were connected by a wide area network using the cross-premises connectivity feature of Windows Server 2012. Cross-premises connectivity enables Gazprom to connect to private subnets in a hosted cloud network. It also enables connectivity between geographically separate subsidiary locations.
The Microsoft Services consultant worked with Gazprom to design the proof-of-concept topology, configure the servers and storage array, set up Hyper-V, and deploy the virtual machines. The team also installed the Cisco Nexus 1000V Series Switch to test the Hyper-V Extensible Switch feature. The Extensible Switch is an open platform that allows third-party vendors to provide plug-ins that supply additional functionality such as traffic monitoring, firewall filters, and switch forwarding.
“Microsoft Services helped us shorten the time it took to understand the many new features in Windows Server 2012,” Meltsin says. “Due to the involvement of Microsoft Services, we could take advantage of these features immediately.”
In its test environment, Gazprom used an HP BladeSystem c3000 blade enclosure with eight HP ProLiant BL460c G7 blade servers (24 blades total) at each location, with each blade enclosure serving as a separate cluster. All servers ran Windows Server 2012 Datacenter. “We have standardized on HP servers,” Starostov says. “We like the reliability level that HP hardware provides and the quality of support. Once, one of our data centers flooded, and not a single HP server was damaged. The servers shut down, but after they dried out they worked fine! The price point is really important, too; they are priced aggressively.”
Test Range of Features
During the RDP, Gazprom tested the increased density of Hyper-V and new high-availability and networking features in Windows Server 2012:
- Hyper-V capacity improvements. Windows Server 2012 supports host servers with up to 320 logical processors and 4 terabytes of physical RAM, virtual machines with up to 64 virtual processors and 1 terabyte of memory, and clusters with as many as 64 nodes and 8,000 virtual machines per cluster. With these improvements, Gazprom can include more virtual machines in each host server and virtualize even the most demanding server applications.
- Hyper-V Replica. Hyper-V Replica provides a storage-agnostic and workload-agnostic solution that replicates virtual machines over IP-based networks. If a disaster occurs at the primary site, Gazprom can restore operations by quickly failing over the replicated services at the target site.
“Hyper-V Replica is very flexible; we can move active virtual machines between data centers, and we have individual control over each virtual machine,” Meltsin says. “Additionally, with traditional disaster recovery technologies, you need to duplicate everything. With Hyper-V Replica, you can have some workloads running in one location and others running in another and replicate those workloads between data centers. Hyper-V Replica is the best disaster recovery solution we have found. And it is included in the operating system with integrated management, which is important for us.”
- Cluster Shared Volume. Gazprom also tested the enhanced Cluster Shared Volume capability in Windows Server 2012. It ran its corporate enterprise resource planning (ERP) application and the corresponding Microsoft SQL Server data management software in Hyper-V virtual machines configured with Cluster Shared Volume. Administrators used Cluster Shared Volume to create file shares that provided simultaneous access to data files, with direct I/O, through all nodes in the file server cluster. The maximum file serving capacity for a given share is no longer limited by the capacity of a single cluster node but rather by the aggregate bandwidth across the cluster.
- Hyper-V Virtual Fibre Channel. Gazprom used the Hyper-V Virtual Fibre Channel, which provides fibre channel ports within the guest operating system and allows administrators to connect to fibre channel storage directly from virtual machines. By using Windows Server 2012, Gazprom can build in-guest failover clusters (failover clusters that span virtual machines rather than physical servers) and thus finally virtualize business-critical applications such as the ERP system and Microsoft Exchange Server, which require very high availability. It is also able to achieve fine-granted control over storage consumption. By using Hyper-V Virtual Fibre Channel, I/O operations for every virtual machine can be tracked and managed individually on the storage system, which is important when building dynamic, multitenant private cloud solutions.
- Hyper-V Network Virtualization. Gazprom will use Hyper-V Network Virtualization to isolate network traffic of different subsidiaries on a shared infrastructure without using virtual local area networks. Gazprom can also use Network Virtualization to move virtual machines within its virtual infrastructure while preserving their IP addresses.
Acquire Management Tools
Gazprom has deployed Microsoft System Center 2012 and plans to use it to centrally manage its newly consolidated cloud infrastructure. System Center 2012 is a complete suite of data center management tools designed specifically for the needs of private cloud environments. “By using System Center, we will be able to manage our whole cloud fabric rather than individual virtual machines,” Starostov says. “It will introduce great management efficiencies.”
After the RDP, Gazprom moved its test servers into production and plans to upgrade all of its servers to Windows Server 2012 beginning September 2012. Investgazavtomatika will deploy Windows Server 2012 in its main data center and gradually migrate the other subsidiaries’ IT operations to this central data center.
Benefits
By upgrading to Windows Server 2012, Gazprom can create a private cloud environment that will help the company reduce capital and operating costs, increase business agility, and improve disaster preparedness.
Reduce Data Center Costs
With the significant capacity improvements in Hyper-V, Gazprom can run more virtual machines on its existing data center infrastructure and reduce server costs. “We will not have to buy new servers this year,” Starostovsays. “Previously, we had to expand our infrastructure by 25 to 30 percent a year. Because we are getting 25 percent more density and value from each host server that runs Windows Server 2012, we can reduce our infrastructure costs by more than 25 percent a year.”
With the automated efficiencies provided by Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 in the areas of virtual machine creation, infrastructure management, cluster failover, and network virtualization, Gazprom will not need to hire more staff to manage a growing infrastructure. “Thanks to Windows Server 2012, we will be able to expand our portfolio of services and our infrastructure without adding staff,” Starostov says. “And the work our staff members are doing will add more value to the company. We will finally have time to create a private cloud, which we haven’t been able to focus on. With all the new capabilities and automated efficiencies built into Windows Server 2012, our staff will spend less time deploying and monitoring servers and more time helping the business achieve its objectives.”
Gazprom also notes that it can license its Microsoft software affordably through its Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, which makes it easy for organizations to license Microsoft enterprise and desktop software. Additionally, by using Windows Server 2012 Datacenter, Gazprom enjoys unlimited virtual machine licensing rights on each two-processor server.
Respond Faster to Business Needs
With a private cloud environment and extensive data center automation, the Gazprom IT organization can respond much faster to business needs, deploying clusters in hours instead of days. In fact, the business units will be able to provision their own virtual machines using a planned self-service provisioning portal.
“Quality IT talent is hard to find in our part of the world, and the automated efficiencies in Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 will help us make the best use of the good people we have,” Starostov says. “Additionally, we won’t have to hire as many expensive specialists, such as networking experts, because so many advanced capabilities are built into the operating system. We just have to activate them.”
Recover Faster from Disasters
By using the high availability features built into Windows Server 2012, Gazprom will be able to recover from disasters much faster. “All our recovery processes were manual before, and now they are all automatic,” Meltsin says. “Recovery will occur in minutes rather than days, which is critical for the business.”
Speedy disaster recovery is especially important once Gazprom centralizes its IT operations in one Investgazavtomatika data center. By using Hyper-V Replica, Cluster Shared Volume, and other high-availability features, Investgazavtomatika can cost-effectively deliver high availability to all Gazprom subsidiaries and ensure that oil and gas exploration continues uninterrupted everywhere Gazprom operates.
Windows Server 2012
Windows Server drives many of the world’s largest data centers, empowers small businesses around the world, and delivers value to organizations of all sizes in between. Building on this legacy, Windows Server 2012 redefines the category, delivering hundreds of new features and enhancements that span virtualization, networking, storage, user experience, cloud computing, automation, and more. Simply put, Windows Server 2012 helps you transform your IT operations to reduce costs and deliver a whole new level of business value.
For more information,visit: