1. IBM XIV Storage Systems Chemicals and Petroleum
Case Study
Denbury strikes oil in SAP
performance with
IBM Power and IBM XIV
Accelerating business-critical processes to meet the needs
of corporate growth
Denbury Resources Inc. (NYSE: DNR) is a growing independent oil and
Overview gas company. The company is the largest oil and natural gas operator in
Mississippi and Montana, owns the largest reserves of CO2 used for terti-
The need
ary oil recovery east of the Mississippi River, and holds significant operat-
Following a major acquisition that effec- ing acreage in the Rockies, Permian Basin, Mid-Continent and Gulf
tively doubled the size of the company,
Denbury’s existing IT infrastructure Coast. The company has its head office in Plano, TX, and employs
began struggling to complete vital around 1,200 people.
processes (such as oil well ownership
calculations) on time.
Denbury’s goal is to increase the value of acquired properties through a
The solution combination of exploitation, drilling and proven engineering extraction
Denbury worked with IBM Business practices, with its most significant emphasis relating to tertiary recovery
Partner VSS to upgrade to IBM® operations. Tertiary recovery typically involves the extraction of oil and
Power® 770 servers, and replaced its gas from older, less productive wells by pumping CO2 into the bore. The
existing disk systems with the IBM XIV®
Storage System. gas injection increases the pressure in the well and reduces the viscosity of
the crude oil, both factors making extraction easier.
The benefit
Processes 60 percent more data and Complex business processes
completes vital monthly processes on
time. Simplifies server and storage “We operate hundreds of wells in different oil fields across the United
management and disaster recovery, States, and each well could potentially be owned by hundreds or even
cutting administrative workload by up to thousands of stakeholders,” comments Todd Krieger, Director of IT—
80 percent for some tasks.
Financial and Operational Applications at Denbury Resources Inc. “Each
of these stakeholders gets a share of the profits of their wells, which is
paid monthly; and we also have to pay state and federal taxes on a
monthly basis. With fluctuations in oil prices, alterations in tax structures
and constant changes in ownership, calculating how much money we owe
to each party is a complex process, which we manage using SAP ERP and
a range of industry-specific applications.”
Denbury might have to carry out between 10 and 200 recalculations of
owners’ interests each month, as well as approximately 10 large batch
runs to handle billing, payments, and other core processes. In recent
2. IBM XIV Storage Systems Chemicals and Petroleum
Case Study
years, the company has been using IBM Power Systems™ servers
and System Storage® disk arrays to run the applications that manage
“The XIV interface is as these processes.
intuitive as an iPhone
When Denbury made a major corporate acquisition—almost doubling
app. You don’t have to the size of its business, and increasing data volumes by around 60 percent
worry about what data overnight—the IT team realized that the time had come to upgrade.
goes where, or how the
“We had maxed out our existing boxes, and we were beginning to strug-
RAID arrays are set gle to get all of our ownership calculations and monthly batch processes
up—you can create new completed on time,” says Krieger. “The new IBM POWER7® proces-
sors provided an easy upgrade path that was capable of delivering all the
storage partitions, take extra performance and capacity we needed.”
snapshots of systems, set
up mirroring and Highly reliable infrastructure
Working with VSS, the Denbury IT team implemented three
migrate data on the fly, IBM Power 770 servers—one to run the SAP production environment,
all with just a few and the other two to handle SAP test and development and other
mouse-clicks.” applications.
“The best thing about the IBM Power Systems infrastructure—and this is
—Todd Krieger, Director of IT—Financial and
Operational Applications at Denbury just as true of the POWER7 servers as it was with POWER6—is their
Resources Inc. reliability,” says Krieger. “I can’t remember a single problem on the server
side since we moved to IBM, and as the IT Director for a 24×7 business,
that really helps me sleep at night!”
“The performance we get from the Power 770 servers is outstanding—
and they’re really only half the story. As a database-driven system, SAP
also relies heavily on the performance of the storage infrastructure, and
we have made a big step forward in this area by investing in the
IBM XIV® Storage System”
Revolutionary storage
Denbury purchased two IBM XIV Storage Systems—a full-rack system
with 79 TB of usable capacity for the main data center, and a half-rack
system with 42 TB for the company’s disaster recovery site in Jackson,
Mississippi. The two systems are linked using asynchronous remote
mirroring to replicate data between the sites.
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3. IBM XIV Storage Systems Chemicals and Petroleum
Case Study
“The XIV architecture is a clever idea—but what’s really revolutionary is
IBM solution components: its intuitive interface,” says Krieger. “You don’t have to worry about what
data goes where, or how the RAID arrays are set up—you can create new
Hardware
storage partitions, take snapshots of systems, set up mirroring and migrate
G IBM® XIV® Storage System data on the fly, all with just a few mouse-clicks.”
G IBM Power® 770
Software “Another important factor is manageability. I used to talk to the
G IBM AIX® 6.1 Enterprise Edition Capgemini teams who manage our AIX®, Oracle and SAP Basis environ-
G IBM PowerVM™ Enterprise Edition ments daily to talk about storage-related issues. Now I only talk to them
on a scheduled weekly call.”
Andy Eggleston, Manager/Hosting at Capgemini, comments: “With the
“The VSS team always old storage landscape, we used continuous replication to transfer data to
focuses on the solutions the disaster recovery site. Implementing the XIV has enabled us to move
that are right for our to an asynchronous mirroring concept based on snapshots, which has
resolved a number of local performance issues at the application level.
business, not their balance The flexibility of the XIV has also enabled us to cut the build time for
sheet. When VSS sug- DR tests from four hours to just one, and we no longer need to suspend
gested that IBM would replication during the tests themselves.
be the best choice for “In addition, from a day-to-day management perspective, the XIV is so
Denbury, we trusted and much easier. Creating new storage partitions takes 80 percent less time
than it used to. Expanding LUNs, which used to take half an hour, is
validated their advice; now a two-minute job. As a result, the Capgemini team can focus on
and the success of this delivering strategic infrastructure enhancements that really add value
project proves that it for Denbury.”
was the right decision.” Getting the job done
The combination of IBM Power 770 and IBM XIV technologies has
—Todd Krieger, Director of IT—Financial and
enabled Denbury to absorb the extra workload created by the company’s
Operational Applications at Denbury
Resources Inc. acquisition strategy. The monthly calculations, billing and payment
processes can be completed on time, enabling Denbury to share the prof-
its from its wells with the correct stakeholders, meet its tax obligations,
and comply with regulatory requirements.
IT Environment:
Databases “The new IBM infrastructure not only meets our current needs—it
G Oracle offers a huge amount of potential for future requirements,” comments
Krieger. “Our main XIV system is only 63 percent utilized at the
Applications
moment, and we can add another three units of 14 processors to each
G SAP ERP of the Power 770 servers, as and when we need to. When VSS suggested
that IBM would be the best choice for Denbury, we trusted and verified
their advice; and the success of this project proves that it was the right
decision.”
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