Multinational Oil Company Rompetrol Group Opts for VCE

Rompetrol Group N.V. turned its energy into improving operations through a series of IT initiatives including an SAP rollout and a move toward private cloud.

“As far as I am concerned, the advantage offered by the Vblock platform can be expressed in just four words: best value for money.“, said Askar Zhakenov, CIO, Rompetrol.

Realizing that its rigid IT infrastructure was not only expensive to operate but also inadequate for its expanded operations, Rompetrol evaluated options for a virtual infrastructure. Rompetrol chose VCE LLC and Vblock Systems for operations at two data centers to serve operations.

In just 12 months, Rompetrol consolidated 675 physical servers to 257 servers running 418 VMs. The consolidation, which included the first phase of Rompetrol’s SAP project, enabled faster application provisioning, improved service levels, and increased IT asset utilization. On the cost side, the switch to Vblock Systems yielded a 64% internal rate of return (IRR), providing significant savings in energy consumption, power and cooling, and maintenance.

Headquartered in Amsterdam, Rompetrol is a multinational oil company, with operations in France, Romania, Spain, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, Cyprus, Switzerland, Libya, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Bulgaria. The company is active in refining, marketing, and trading, with additional operations in: exploration and production; drilling; engineering, procurement, construction management (EPCM); transportation. Following a period marked by growth through acquisition, Rompetrol began to focus on implementing new business processes and achieving operational excellence.

While focused on a company wide rollout of SAP, Rompetrol also realized that its costly and complex IT environment was not up to the task of supporting its far reaching operations. With some 700 servers, over 20 storage systems, and several hundreds of applications and management responsibilities falling between two IT business units, IT was not as efficient as it needed to be. A study had shown that only 2-3% of available CPU processing power was being used, largely because each new project came with dedicated hardware and there was no virtualized environment to optimize server workloads. Only 20% of storage was being utilized and, with the exception of e-mail and ERP, there was no overall DR solution.

In response, the company decided to build a private cloud based on Vblock Systems. This would enable them to use industry processing, storage, unified communications, management, and security solutions from Cisco, EMC, and VMware. This scalable, and extensible platform allows the large-scale adoption of virtualization across various domains-from servers and OSs, to business applications like ERP, CRM, and BI.

“We chose the Vblock platform after a thorough evaluation of performance indicators. Other factors included guaranteed support and the integration of the components ,” says Zhakenov.

Rompetrol deployed twin Vblock Systems, one at the main data center and one at the DR site. For backup and replication, they chose EMC Avamar and Recover Point.

In just 12 months, Rompetrol went from no VMs and 675 physical servers to 418 VMs and 257 physical servers. The final phase of the project will see the company’s mission critical applications migrated onto the Vblock system, increasing the level of consolidation and virtualization to over 500 VMs and decreasing physical server count to 100.

The company has been able to accelerate one of Romania’s largest ERP deployments to date.

“The solution supports the activity of all divisions of the Rompetrol group, so the implementation roadmap was very strict. Consolidating the IT infrastructure on Vblock Systems helped us reach the aggregate objectives of the first phase,” says Giani Kacic, SAP project director, Rompetrol.

Financially, moving to Vblock Systems also had a positive impact, providing a 22% ROI and 64% internal rate of return. These calculations include savings realized it the areas of energy consumption, power and cooling, and maintenance. The consolidation of racks, from 45 to 29, also provided an overall space saving of 30%. In addition, IT asset utilization rates have increased, with CPU usage up from 2.7 to 17%, and RAM usage up from 53 to 90%. Storage operations have also been optimized. Systems backup now consumes 69% less storage space and can be completed 75% faster, down from nearly 9 hours to 2 hours.

Operational efficiency has also improved. IT is far more responsive to the needs of the business. The virtualized environment with centralized management has cut server time-to-provisioning from months to just hours, while also halving IT workloads. Service availability has increased from 93.7 to 99.8%, with the monthly average rate of incidents falling from three to just 0.05.