HP DR Solutions Help IOCL Integrate Sensitive Data

Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOCL) is the country’s flagship oil company, accounting for 56% market share among PSU companies, 42% national refining capacity and 69% downstream pipeline throughput capacity.

IOCL’s countrywide network of over 23,000 sales points is backed for supplies by its extensive marketing infrastructure comprising 165 bulk storage terminals, installations and depots, 95 aviation fuelling stations and 87 LPG bottling plants.

In order to extend 24/7 support to its customers and better manage the corporate data, IOCL recently deployed Business Continuity solutions from HP.

Data Recovery – A business prerequisite

Hyper competition and fluctuating fortunes typify the business dynamics of the oil and gas industry. Imperative to their growth objectives, companies in this sector often find the need to streamline their supply chains. IOCL too wanted to ensure that its enterprise-wide processes are streamlined, scalable, reliable and visible.

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According to S. Ramasamy, general manager, Information Systems, IOCL, “In our business and especially with respect to a sensitive product like petroleum, if data is irretrievable, we face a loss in productivity. Downtime and data loss can have a great effect on the bottom-line of our business. Thus, data storage and backups form a crucial part of our mission-critical operations that need to be addressed by an advanced architecture and related support services. Security and integrity of data with the geographical spread out of our depots compelled us to think about a strong business continuity solution.”

Implementing DR with zero down time

IOCL wanted a 3-tier disaster architecture which consists of a primary and secondary site. This premise was primarily driven by the dynamics of conducting business in the emerging competitive environment. HP was a mission critical service partner of IOCL. Designing a sound 3-tier DR architecture became imperative for HP considering IOCL’s well-outlined and highly critical business continuity needs.

The primary site at Gurgaon (which also hosts the Data Centre) became operational first, followed by the secondary DR site at Jaipur. There are 2 HP Superdome servers in the primary site, 2 in the Jaipur site and 1 in the local DR site called as DR 1. The production site is powered by HP Superdome servers in cluster along with XP Storage Array from HP. Further, there are a number of PA RISC servers at both Gurgaon and Jaipur. The set-up is replicated in Jaipur and a minimum set up is also available in the local DR 1.

“We did a detailed analysis on our requirements and challenges and migrated to our new infrastructures with zero down time. HP - our Mission Critical Services partner understood our typical problems and devised their DR solution and services accordingly. The entire DR architecture has been configured by HP and all the systems in terms of servers, application servers, networking components, storage are all from HP. We have redundancies built in to ensure seamless business continuity. The 3-tier DR solution has been efficiently deployed by the HP Services team who also provide ongoing support at all levels to IOCL. The whole deployment process is part of our Rs 100 crore investment in IT infrastructure. SAP, which has been deployed earlier, is also a part of this expansion project.”

Continuous data flow ensures improved customer service

HP’s DR solution has enabled IOCL to take business continuance to an elevated dimension. The deployment of Business Continuity solutions along with SAP has streamlined the operations in 674 locations across the country. IOCL’s information exchange and functional processes are now responsive, real-time and reliable. Given the scale and nature of its business, it was imperative for IOCL to prepare itself for unplanned events like power outages and natural disasters. The implementation of 3-tier DR architecture has helped the company achieve this.

“The deployment has helped us serve our customers in a better way. The systems are highly available and also reliable. It has ultimately helped in improving the productive capacity. In case, a particular site is unable to provide data flow, other sites make up for the loss. We are now able to coordinate with all our depots and the relevant information is now readily available with us,” states Ramaswamy.