When Katrina hit in 2005, Murphy Exploration and Production Company, USA was among the many companies impacted by the devastation. Challenged to implement a new infrastructure quickly with more business continuity considerations, Murphy deployed Virtuozzo across its server infrastructure.
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Customer Success Story
Rebuilding after Katrina: Murphy Exploration and Production Company, USA, Improves Server Manageability and Flexibility
Challenged to implement a new infrastructure quickly with more Murphy Exploration and Production business continuity considerations, Murphy deploys Virtuozzo across Company, USA, is a division its server infrastructure. of Murphy Oil. Murphy Oil Corporation is a worldwide oil and gas exploration and production company with refining Business Challenge and marketing operations in the United States and the United Kingdom and Norman Jee, Sr. Systems Specialist, managed the Murphy Exploration and Production crude oil and natural gas exploration Company data center located in New Orleans. When Katrina hit in 2005, Murphy was and production operations in Canada.among the many companies impacted by the devastation. Although the servers did not sustain any physical damage due to the seventh floor location, they were inaccessible without power or connectivity. The only recovery provision was tape backup restora- "If there is a backup or in our tion, and the tapes were stored in the data center. Murphy could not reach or use its data until the water receded and the servers were moved. case, a replica of the virtual
After retrieving the servers from New Orleans, Jee and his group established a tempo- system instance at a remote rary data center in Lafayette, Louisiana. Jee was tasked with implementing a solution site, the machine would be in line with the department's revised disaster recovery plan. The revised plan called for portable Windows machines equipped with replication and snapshot components able to be brought online for server redundancy. It was also necessary for the server to be always available and immediately with minor recon-functioning at same or near same levels as the production servers. "We decided to investigate using virtualization to meet the system portability component and to reduce figuration changes."the number of physical devices," said Jee. - Norman Jee, In the original data center, Jee managed several servers and combined non-interfer- Sr. Systems Specialist,ing applications on the same servers. Some data made sense, such as file and print Murphy Explorationservers that didn't really bother other server co-habitants. Loading multiple applications on the same server was troublesome. Every time an application needed to be updated Virtuozzo Scenariosand rebooted, the entire server was taken down affecting other applications. Adding another application to the existing infrastructure meant adding another server. . Server and OS Consolidation. Dynamic Workload Management Not only would server virtualization consolidate the existing server infrastructure, it would provide a seamless disaster recovery solution. According to Jee, "virtual ma- . Business Continuity (DR/HA) chines fit well with a disaster recovery plan because the systems are portable. If there . Internal and Commercial Hosting is a backup or in our case, a replica of the virtual system instance at a remote site, the . Development & Testingmachine would be able to be brought online immediately with minor reconfiguration changes." . Centralized Desktop Management
EvaluationAs an IT veteran, Jee was already familiar with VMware and its capabilities. When con-sidering his options, he went directly to Virtuozzo for an evaluation. "With Virtuozzo we had the advantages that came with virtualization, particularly for disaster recovery, as well as the good disk and CPU performance."A primarily consideration was the need to virtualize a range of applications, many of Hardwarethem high I/O, and he could not afford to take a high performance penalty by adding virtualization. "I was convinced that because each virtual environment would have . Dell 6850 access to each physical CPU that was installed on the physical server that my virtual . 3.1 GHz Quad Dual-Core environments would have available CPU resources," said Jee. Intel Xeon ProcessorsFor disaster recovery, constant data replication and consistency was important. "By . 64 GB of RAM Mirroredhaving an up to date replica of our servers, Virtuozzo would allow us to move the iden-tical system to another site. With the Virtuozzo directory on our SAN, we could turn up "It's a huge benefit t... [download for more]
