Challenge:
The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) is the National Oil Corporation through which the federal government of Nigeria regulates and participates in the country’s petroleum industry. NNPC by law manages the joint venture between the Nigerian federal government and a number of foreign multinational corporations. Through collaboration with these companies, the Nigerian government conducts petroleum exploration and production.
Like many other large corporations, NNPC faces a changing set of business demands. These include the need to simplify operations, make better use of assets, and reduce costs, while also improving application performance and end user experience through increased availability, speed, and agility of services. A technological evaluation of suitable network components prompted the question of an overall architecture that could help ensure the future value for NNPC’s data center.
Solution:
NNPC’s existing infrastructure had served it for years, but was beginning to be challenged by the need to provide more bandwidth for applications while meeting the need to physically separate traffic for the various departments. Within the data center, bundling links to increase bandwidth was a complicated operation demanding a lot of extra cabling. Overall business agility was constrained by a shortage of maintenance windows. User demand meant that there were only two weekend-long maintenance windows each year for major upgrades, and these had to be shared with other teams, such as those managing servers.
NNPC evaluated several proposals and selected the solution presented by Weco Systems, a Cisco Tier one GOLD partner. Weco Systems investigated the technology options. While it was possible to upgrade the existing infrastructure it became clear that a far better choice was to re-design the network using ADVANCED CISCO NEXUS SERIES SWITCHES. This new platform has been specifically designed for data centers and is a major step forward in increasing availability, speed, and ease of operations.
The Cisco Nexus platform is a technology foundation and key enabler of Cisco Data Center Business Advantage, an architectural approach that provides tighter integration of servers, networks, and storage systems, which in turn helps to deliver new improvements in performance and cost efficiency.
Results:
With its Cisco and Network refresh, NNPC adopted an enterprise-class network to support increased demands from constituents. Since the solution was implemented, network stability issues have become a thing of the past and IT help desk incidents have declined. As a result, IT staff can make more efficient use of their budget and staff can spend time focusing on more strategic initiatives to improve customer service across departments.
During the commissioning of the state of the art Data Centre, the General Manager, ISD; Don Aholu while welcoming the Group Managing Director of NNPC, Engr. Andy Yakubu and other Chiefs within the corporate said that delivery of the Data Centre 비록 is one of the initiatives that IT has successfully undertaken within the last two and half years in a deliberate attempt to transform NNPC to a world class organization. He explained that the Data Centre was built to host the most demanding and mission critical enterprise and line of business systems and solutions.
He further reiterated that hosting of NNPC mission critical business solutions in the Data Centre instead of with third parties is expected to yield savings of $5 million dollars per annum for the corporation. He said that to ensure availability of business systems 24/7, the Data Centre will be supported by a state of the art Business Continuity centre that is nearing completion.
With the added Cisco security features, IT management benefits from tremendous oversight of who and what devices are on the network, whether wired or wireless. IT can also better control the risks associated with that access for some numerous computers serving the large corporation. Weco Systems approach also ensures Web Security Appliance protects users from accessing malicious websites and prevents malware and virus infections. IT administrators can now control access to online web applications and securely allow users to use social networking sites and other Web 2.0 sites for collaboration.
The prevalence of excellent local expertise for Cisco technology, including the skilled consulting and deployment provided by WECO SYSTEMS, allowed the IT department to achieve a swift, easier-than-expected implementation within critical timeframe. NNPC can take full advantage of these local resources and the robust features of its new data centre to stay on track with new technologies as they emerge for years to come.
For More Information:
To experience the result of this first class integration, please send your inquiries to marketing@wecosysgroup.com
