VMware announced Kuwait National Petroleum Company will deploy VMware NSX network virtualisation and VMware vRealize Suite to deliver IT as a service through a new multisite private cloud. Through its cloud initiative, and with the help of VMware technologies, the petroleum company will accelerate service delivery, improve IT efficiency and deliver a better customer experience.
Kuwait National Petroleum Company is one of the biggest oil and gas companies in the Gulf region. The company has two main refineries, and is building one of the biggest refineries in the world. Kuwait National Petroleum Company partnered with VMware to move from server virtualisation to the private cloud to deliver IT as a service to users. This cloud transformation is occurring in parallel with the organisation’s adoption of DevOps methodologies. Ultimately the long term strategy is to deliver a community cloud offering infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and database as a service to developers both at the company and its sister companies.
Kuwait National Petroleum Company has deployed VMware vRealize Suite for cloud management and operations. With vRealize Operations, Kuwait National Petroleum Company gains better visibility into the IT infrastructure. This enables the company to better predict capacity requirements, and enables faster time to resolution through monitoring. The IT automation capabilities of vRealize Automation help eliminate manual tasks, which makes IT more efficient and also minimises security risk.
Kuwait National Petroleum Company realised that the company could not fully achieve the benefits of a multisite private cloud without virtualising the network. Without VMware NSX network virtualisation, the network would remain a bottleneck to servicing the business by limiting the ability to roll out new or updated services with full security in a timely manner. The company will use NSX for automation, security and application continuity. With NSX micro-segmentation, IT will be able to apply granular controls to application security and build a resilient and natively secure software defined datacentre. NSX will enable the company to live migrate VMs or entire datacentres from one location to another with little to no application downtime. Finally, NSX will enable Kuwait National Petroleum Company to pool compute resources from any of their existing three physical datacentres which will operate as a single logical cloud.
“Our adoption of a VMware based software defined datacentre will enable our cloud transformation, and help IT be a strategic partner by operating at the speed at which our business is moving,” said Abdulaziz A Al-Duaij, Manager, Information Technology Department, Kuwait National Petroleum Company. “The units throughout our refineries depend on IT services for informed decision making. Our VMware based private cloud lets us provision IT services faster, and enables us to put applications and big data on top of our cloud services so senior management has access to actionable business intelligence.”
Kuwait National Petroleum Company believes the payoffs from its VMware based private cloud will be very tangible. Service delivery will be 60-70% faster, which will help mitigate shadow IT. High levels of automation, better visibility and the ability to implement a hardware vendor agnostic infrastructure will drive down costs. The company’s IT expects to achieve resource utilisation rates that are 3x better, and every day management activities known as keep the lights on costs are expected to go down by as much as 60%. These budget savings can be invested in new innovations. Finally, Kuwait National Petroleum Company expects the VMware based private cloud will help them improve overall IT’s overall customer satisfaction rating.