Bunduq is leveraging StorageCraft’s OneXafe platform to scale-out immutable storage architecture technology to improve scalability, simplify its backup and replication process and make substantial cuts to the company’s storage footprint. Muayad Fahmawi, Bunduq’s IT Supervisor – who heads up the company’s IT team – looks to equip the business with best-of-industry technology and solutions.
Bunduq Company Limited was leveraging a scale-up storage architecture from its previous vendors to facilitate data backup processes, but soon found the technology severely lacking: its scalability was limited, its maintenance was complex and inefficient and the overall system was not cost-effective.
By opting for OneXafe from StorageCraft, an Arcserve company, Bunduq was able to leverage the platform’s scale-out immutable storage architecture technology to improve scalability and simplify its backup and replication process, as well as make substantial cuts to its storage footprint. Over the last two years of operations, OneXafe’s Return on Investment (RoI) and its overall performance has exceeded Bunduq’s expectations.
Introduction
The El Bunduq offshore oil field is unlike most of its counterparts: located some 200km north-west of Abu Dhabi and some 100km east of Doha, it straddles the boundary between the UAE and Qatar. It is often cited as an example of diplomatic cooperation between the two Gulf states. Bunduq Company Limited has been in charge of operating the El Bunduq oil field for more than four decades now and has banked high praise for its capable, expert management of the oil field.
Bunduq Company Limited was set up in 1970 with the purpose of developing the El Bunduq oil field into a crucial asset for the two neighbouring governments. The field commenced oil production in 1975 and in the years since has graduated into an example of operational efficiency. Today, the company employs more than 300 people, as well as several rotating contractors and operates through its three offices in the UAE.
Over the years, digital technologies have grown indispensable to the day-to-day operations and management of oil and gas companies – having an agile, resilient, dependable and scalable IT infrastructure is a critical must across the industry. And so, Bunduq’s IT Supervisor, Muayad Fahmawi, and his team of seven experts, look to equip their business with best-of-industry technology and solutions.
The challenge
A few years ago, Bunduq embraced a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) to maintain stability and boost performance across its many digital processes. To facilitate data backups, the company leveraged a scale-up storage environment using solutions from previous vendors. But Muayad and his team soon grew conscious of the many shortcomings of this type of storage architecture – scale-up technology only allowed them to add data within a fixed upper limit, at which point they would be forced to add more storage controllers or look to system upgrades and newer models with higher capacities.
This, of course, was not cost-effective at all, not with the growing volume of data the company needed to back up. Also, as its data would grow, this scale-up storage architecture would become increasingly complex to manage, with severe inefficiencies in data migration and workload resource allocation. Seeing that this setup could no longer meet the company’s needs, especially not in the long run, Muayad and his team decided to upgrade to a scale-out storage solution.
“We needed a solution that would not only be compatible with our hyperconverged setup, but one that would also be able to manage the sheer volume of data we were generating and needed to backup,” said Muayad.
“Our data growth is exponential and we had to have multiple backups in place to cover our Disaster Recovery site. But this was becoming complex and inefficient – we wanted to consolidate everything in one place.”
The solution
Understanding Bunduq’s needs, UAE-based IT and cybersecurity solution provider Unicorp Technologies LLC, and one of StorageCraft’s regional partners, recommended the OneXafe platform to Muayad and his team. OneXafe would easily blend into the company’s setup, would secure its data and, most importantly, would meet its mounting capacity needs. It was also more powerful and offered a much wider range of features compared to any of its alternatives.
“StorageCraft’s OneXafe series not only provided scale-out architecture, but it also offered ransomware protection to backup files thanks to the immutable snapshots it takes every 90 seconds, which made it unique when compared to other storage solutions. It also had replication features built into the same license, which made it that much more cost-effective. And the management console OneSystem made it much easier to manage – with all these advanced features, we felt that OneXafe met our needs and then some,” said Muayad.
OneXafe is designed to offer scalable capacity for either primary or secondary workloads, and immutable storage. It expands storage seamlessly – by either adding one drive at a time, or multiple nodes within a cluster – without any configuration changes to the application. OneXafe also minimises storage requirements with powerful data reduction technologies such as inline deduplication and compression, therefore reducing costs of storage as well as operational expenses.
The results
Bunduq saw immediate benefits of introducing the OneXafe 4412 platform into its infrastructure.
“It is an incredibly user-friendly solution; it’s just plug and play. The implementation was quick, it fit in seamlessly and we didn’t need any training. It requires limited monitoring, limited maintenance. It has been so effective that within a year we were adding a second box to the cluster to increase our backup coverage,” said Muayad.
Bunduq now stores more than 80 TB of business-critical data on OneXafe. The company’s IT team has also been impressed with the solution’s superior deduplication and compression features, which have severely reduced its storage footprint. According to Muayad, last year the data received clocked in at around 562 TB, but the data ultimately returned to storage registered nearer to 73 TB. Now, after two years of using OneXafe, Bunduq’s IT team is reporting a data reduction ratio of just under 8:1.
“OneXafe’s performance has exceeded our expectations – its return-on-investment is quite substantial. Its scalability, as well as its compression and deduplication technology have boosted our efficiency and reduced our cost of operations. And its ransomware protection ensures that our business-critical data is secure. It supports any expansion plans we might undertake now, or in the future,” said Muayad.
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