One of the largest energy producers in the world, Total S.A. is a French multinational company whose businesses cover the entire oil and gas supply chain. Its global operations encompass everything from crude oil and natural gas exploration and production to power generation, transportation, refining, petroleum product marketing, and international crude oil and product trading.
To support all these operations, Total’s IT environment is running a wide variety of applications on premises. In addition, the organization also has extensive public cloud and private cloud environments, including Microsoft Azure. In the cyclic energy industry, cloud technology gives Total the flexibility to support services for a limited amount of time, then move on to new projects.
Total needed to provide a consistent platform and management for all of the company’s sites, regardless of size. Some offices contain as few as three people, while others may support up to 1,000 employees. The organization needed a strategic solution that would position it to respond to any need. The company was also seeking to dramatically minimize the size of its data center footprint as part of its environmental initiatives to reduce greenhouse emissions.
Cost & Efficiency: Significantly reduced TCO and minimized data center footprint to support greener operations.
Agility: Gained the flexibility to rapidly deploy and allocate computing resources to new sites.
Reliability: Achieved three years of dependable IT operations with zero service outages.
Over the past few years, we have migrated our operations to several clusters throughout North America. These 11 clusters are 100 percent Nutanix, with no other infrastructure. Standardizing on the Nutanix solution has enabled us to dramatically reduce TCO, while helping us make our operations more efficient.
The first phase of Total’s transformation focused on modernizing its siloed data center. The company was an early adopter of the Nutanix HCI solution and is now continuing to extend its environment across its global sites. The Nutanix HCI solution lets the organization avoid the time and costs associated with managing multiple OEM environments, while providing both flexibility and support for standardization. If a group in the company has deployed a service or application on another environment, Total can still provide the resources they need to support it.
Total employs a full range of Nutanix solutions across its sites, including all of its North American operations. The company is continuing to ramp up its Nutanix environment to enable additional sites and services, optimizing costs using the solution together with other technologies. Total’s goal is to deploy AHV and Nutanix Files to support its environments, reduce hypervisor costs, and simplify administration under a single, unified dashboard.
Consolidating multiple siloed resources onto the single hyperconverged environment lets Total minimize its data center size to consume fewer power and cooling resources and support greener, more energy-efficient operations. In the U.S., Total is running a full set of refinery operations on the Nutanix HCI solution and has completed or started numerous distinct projects based on the Nutanix infrastructure for its affiliates around the world. Its goal is to provide a standardized solution for everyone and extract information from any environment or technology, whether it is SAP HANA or Oracle databases.
Deploying Nutanix solutions helps provide efficient IT capabilities to the Total Group, ensuring the reliability and performance of IT services required to maintain its business leadership in the challenging energy production space. Availability of services is critical in this industry. With the Nutanix infrastructure solution in its facilities in North America, Total has experienced no loss of services for its affiliates in the past three years.
Nutanix solutions also enable Total to quickly deploy resources at will to keep pace with dynamic needs. The flexible, standardized solution gives Total the ability to roll in and roll out systems, and grow and repurpose as needed. The IT organization may have a cluster running at a site one week, and when it is no longer required, it can be taken down and deployed somewhere else in a few days. The hyperconverged environment makes it easy to move resources depending on changing needs.
The Nutanix solution also alerts administrators about potential support and compatibility issues in advance, giving them plenty of time to proactively upgrade nodes and other components before operations are impacted. Streamlining administration and enhancing automation has enabled Total to optimize operational costs, including maintenance and resources required to support its operations. Additionally, Nutanix solutions help enhance change control management, which is especially important in the energy industry, because a simple configuration error can ripple out across the system to impact thousands of users. To maintain the security and integrity of sensitive industry data, Total also utilizes the solution’s built-in data protection and one-click security upgrades.
With Nutanix solutions steadily powering its key infrastructure operations, Total now has an extensible foundation that can bring new efficiencies to its operations. By activating Nutanix Flow, the company automates common networking operations while applying application-centric protection from network threats. The organization is introducing more automation capabilities with Nutanix Flow, as well as collaboration with HashiCorp Terraform. Total is in the process of developing a playbook to support all of its systems, and automation plays a major role. Nutanix solutions let Total easily extend its resources to support new sites and applications without requiring highly technical personnel to deploy them. By enabling Total to standardize how it creates and deploys new services, Nutanix solutions help make project management more efficient.