Gazprom Neft upgrades an IT environment

On February 26, 2014 the Asteros Consulting company announced complete upgrade of the computing platform by request of the Gazprom Neft group and migration 48 SAP systems of the customer.

Project Tasks

In plans of the Gazprom Neft group by 2020 - to double hydrocarbon production volume, and – to improve indicators on oil processing for 75%. For this purpose, in particular, initiated global transformation of the IT platform of the enterprise.

Within the project decided to carry out upgrade of a hardware platform on the basis of the equipment of IBM and to transfer to it a SAP environment of the enterprise.

According to the results of an open competition the chief contractor chooses a command "Asteros Consulting". Vendors SAP and IBM, specialists were connected to project implementation ITSC.

Project Progress

"We should transfer all business systems covering almost full stroke of work of the enterprise to a new hardware platform: production, finance, HR, the business analysis, management of capital construction, logistics, it is sold, etc. The number of users of these services is about 15 thousand human. It is difficult to revaluate the error price in planning and project implementation. Any failure or a delay could lead as to shutdown of one of important business functions, and to complete paralyzing of business at several o'clock, not to mention possible data loss. On expert evaluations, losses for business within 1 hour of idle time of systems could be up to 35 million rubles", – Konstantin Kravchenko, the Chief information officer of Gazprom Neft company told.

The IT landscape Gazprom Neft is created on the basis of SAP solutions. Importance of operating condition of these services for business strictly limited completion dates of the project. On the most resource-intensive and important sector of works on migration of SAP systems 5 months were allotted, at the same time works should be carried out at the same time in two data centers of the company: one in St. Petersburg, the second - in the territory of Omsk Refinery. Both centers are connected in network where it was required to implement full redundancy of all systems of SAP, to provide disaster tolerance.

"According to the statistics the last years, about 38% of migration projects come to an end with failure. Detailed planning of process on stages allowed not to get to this number to us. The methodology of their accomplishment is developed on the basis of best practices IBM and SAP and also taking into account the experience accumulated by us. More than 150 specialists therefore for reliable and high-quality migration our competences on management of project resources had huge value entered into project team", – noted Lev Nikolau, the head "Asteros Consulting".

The final solution is created on the IBM Power 780 platform and storage systems of IBM V7000. In each data center about 2 Power780 in a cluster therefore it is provided are set? both local, and global reservation. All IBM Power 780 systems have resources which can be used for smooth accumulation of power without stopping of the productive systems, in process of growth of loading and implementation of new business functionality. At the same time such scheme made possible load distribution between data centers and provided high cost efficiency of the solution due to lack of idle resources.

Project Results

48 systems "are postponed" for the new equipment. In a project deliverable use of resources of corporate data centers of Gazprom Neft company decreased from 95% to 60%, the fault tolerance and availability of services is increased. Time of providing new resources at the request of business divisions was reduced to one week, and the recovery time of operability of systems is of 5 minutes till several o'clock depending on type of failure or accident now.

"At a stage of the choice of the platform Gazprom Neft carried out the serious analysis of the computing systems presented at the market. Were taken experience of implementation of large projects on consolidations and also additional requirements of the customer about need of ensuring operability of a complex without loss of functionality and performance in case of any failures and even accidents into consideration. So high reliability was provided at the expense of unique opportunities of means of virtualization of Power Systems, – Andrey Filatov, the Head of Department of hardware of IBM Russia/CIS company told. - It would also be desirable to note great team job and professionalism of specialists of the customer, IBM and Asteros companies which could complete successfully in a short time the difficult project, the recognized IBM as the most technological project of 2012".

The project allowed the oil company to double performance of business services and provided a technology basis for achievement of the strategic objectives stated until 2020.