Australian Oil and Gas Company Beach Energy Selecting PernixData FVP Software

PernixData, Inc., announced that Beach Energy Ltd, an oil and gas exploration and production company headquartered in Adelaide, South Australia, has deployed its FVP software to optimize the performance of strategic virtualized applications like SharePoint, while minimizing storage costs.

Beach Energy holds interests in approximately 300 exploration and production tenements in Australia, Egypt, Tanzania, Romania, and New Zealand. The company relies heavily on SharePoint to collaborate between these geographically diverse locations. As the company saw user load on their SharePoint systems increase, they wanted to ensure their existing Dell Compellent storage arrays could handle the load without impacting end user productivity.

Beach Energy’s senior systems engineer, Morgan Llewellyn, considered a number of different options to optimize SharePoint performance, including adding more storage arrays and servers. Instead, he decided to complement his existing Dell server and storage environment with FVP Software.

FVP is a key infrastructure element of any virtualized data center. The software virtualizes server-side flash and memory into a low latency clustered acceleration tier that enables IT administrators to optimize VM performance while scaling-out storage performance independent of storage capacity.

“The installation and configuration of FVP software is very easy, taking less than 15 minutes to install,” said Llewellyn. “The only change to our infrastructure was to install a PCIe SSD flash drive into each host.“

With FVP software in place, Beach Energy’s SharePoint performance has increased, with 2 billion writes in just four months served locally from server flash instead of the shared array. By offloading SharePoint performance into the server, other applications also benefited from FVP, like virtual desktops. This enhanced end user productivity across various departments within the company.

In addition, FVP extended the life of Beech Energy’s existing storage infrastructure, eliminating the need to purchase over $200,000 AUD of new storage.

“PernixData FVP software is an elegant solution that I would recommend it to anyone,” concluded Llewellyn.