KNPC selects Dell EMC to fuel agile business growth

Dell EMC yesterday announced that the Kuwait National Petroleum Company (KNPC), one of the largest oil refining companies in the region, has successfully deployed Dell EMC’s industry leading storage solutions to drive an agile and future-ready business. Through these deployments, KNPC aims to support rapid data growth and create a highly available foundation for round the clock service delivery.

KNPC selected Dell EMC’s VMAX3 enterprise storage systems, Vplex Metro and VNX unified storage arrays to create the right storage environment to support data mobility across KNPC’s three data centers. With an aim to optimize storage efficiencies, KNPC further reinforced this deployment with solutions from Dell EMC’s leading data protection and availability division.

With Dell EMC data protection software stack and Data Domain protection storage platforms, KNPC is able to protect the integrity of data and application services while enabling continuous data protection and disaster avoidance capabilities. Additionally, KNPC deployed EMC’s ViPR controller and ViPR SRM to develop advanced storage automation capabilities to drive cost efficiency and simplify operational management.

Improved performance: Dell EMC’s VMAX3 and VNX unified storage arrays have enabled KNPC to consolidate its storage infrastructure, to increase the level of data availability and enhance the performance of mission critical applications.

Hyper-Scale data protection: KNPC achieved hyper-reduplication for its backups by a factor exceeding 130 times, which helped protect over 14 Petabytes of critical data backups on Data Domain. This allowed KNPC to meet compliance and data retention requirements with minimum data center footprint. Furthermore with Data Domain KNPC minimized dependence on tape media. The 14+ PB of data backups would have resulted in 5,000 tapes with massive cost, management overhead and risks and this is what Dell EMC was able to successfully address with its Data protection software and Data Domain.

Increased Efficiency: Using Dell EMC’s enterprise storage solutions KNPC has successfully optimized data storage utilization, total cost of ownership (TCO), rack space and power by 50%.

Enhanced Trust: With Data Protection solutions, KNPC drives a unified backup, recovery and archiving environment to protect critical data and applications, simultaneously meeting internal governance and compliance requirements.

Business continuity: With Vplex Metro, two of KNPC’s data centers can ensure continuous service availability to assure uptime for their business critical applications. This is a major evolution from legacy approaches of disaster recovery to disaster avoidance. Simplified Management: Advanced automation capabilities offered by ViPR Suite allow KNPC to easily manage applications and data across multiple storage environments, reducing IT complexities.

Established in 1960, KNPC is largely responsible for maximizing the value of hydrocarbons found in Kuwait and is considered the driving force behind boosting the country’s economy. In order to reach new markets, KNPC has pioneered clean fuel projects and plans to multiply its oil refining capacity. In addition, KNPC aimed at establishing a truly connected storage infrastructure to effectively manage its data that can serve as a competitive advantage in this era of massive oil-price fluctuations.

In order to meet this objective, KNPC deployed Dell EMC’s VMAX3, VNX unified storage arrays and Vplex Metro to enhance data storage utilization and effectively manage traditional and next generation business applications. Supplementing its efforts to create an agile storage environment, KNPC deployed Dell EMC’s NetWorker, Data Domain and Avamar to create an integrated backup and archiving infrastructure to fuel its data availability and recovery performance.

With this deployment, KNPC observed major improvements on shorter backups and data compression reduction rates. This has resulted in efficient storage optimization, providing more room to sustain data growth. This also helps KNPC to sustain its business services availability against unforeseen data loss that can impact customer experience and its overall brand equity.

KNPC came full circle with its transformational journey with the deployment of ViPR controller and ViPR SRM that eliminates the need to adopt multiple storage systems, allowing automation of applications and services through centralized management and enabling the company to deliver storage-as-a-Service. KNPC has successfully created a truly connected, next generation storage infrastructure that is resilient to support the needs of a rapidly changing economy.