Background
CNOOC International is one of the largest oil and gas companies in Uganda’s energy sector and owns one-third interest in each Exploration areas and Kingfisher. These block areas, located in the Lake Albert Rift Basin, are in one of the most promising basins for oil and gas resources in Africa. CNOOC sought to improve its operational efficiency and deliver a system that can boost its application performance and store its data securely.
Business Challenge
CNOOC International has incorporated the use of Information and Communications Technology tools to enable its organizational business processes to be Timely, Transparent, Secure, and Efficient. Later, they realised that one of the most important business needs of CNOOC is the capability to continue business around the clock from any location at any given time, and ensuring business continuity, which requires critical applications and systems to be available and accessible to its users wherever they are. In the current setup they had at that time, storage was a problem and no longer accommodated in the space they had, and any natural or manmade disaster that could occur to their current data center would heavily impact the continuity of business in the organization.
Our Implementation
We implemented a robust and scalable Lenovo and Nutanix hyperconverged Infrastructure and Software Delivery advanced solution on the CNOOC data center that addressed all of the client’s needs:
- Provided Lenovo ThinkAgile HX3720 hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) Server nodes (On-Prem) data center powered by Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor software, which was vital for the realization of continuous business operation of the CNOOC, which comprised the critical components of compute, network, and storage infrastructure.
- Leveraged capabilities like autoscaling to automatically spin up/down ThinkAgile HX3720 resources based on demand and provide data space storage for an organization.
- Established secure two-way communication between Servers across different applications and platforms using Nutanix software.
- Enabled end-to-end encryption and audit compliance using Nutanix’s advanced security features.
Business Results
With our solution, CNOOC realized numerous benefits:
- Reduced operational costs by leveraging the elasticity of Lenovo ThinkAgile HX3720 and Nutanix software
- Ability to reliably handle large data volumes through sharing data space within the nodes.
- Faster deployment times using automated provisioning of Nutanix which can spin up new VDI environment adding more machines in a matter of seconds.
- Secure transfer of data across different systems with end-to-end encryption.
- CNOOC credits its success not only to its modernized equipment but also to its partnership with Lenovo, Nutanix and SBS Systems Uganda. Rather than upgrade outdated hardware and software and evolve from the past, they collaborated to rethink the company’s entire infrastructure with future business goals in mind.
By leveraging the hyperconverged solution on the datacentre, CNOOC’s transparency, planning and build a knowledge transfer plan into the contract helped a lot. CNOOC assigned their IT consultant to collaborate with the Lenovo, Nutanix and SBS Engineers in designing and deploying the system. We worked together to understand CNOOC’s existing environments, its processes, and how much data, cores, memory and storage it needed, then we developed a blueprint to move the old system to Nutanix.
“Lenovo, Nutanix and SBS were part of the build process from the beginning and had that hands-on training, so the transition was seamless,” says CNOOC’s IT Consultant
