Size: 1400 employees ⋅ Industry: Chemicals, energy, and fertilizers Location: Murdoch, Australia
Challenges
Solutions
Results
Wesfarmers Chemicals, Energy & Fertilisers (WesCEF) operates chemical, energy, and fertiliser businesses that serve a range of sectors in Australian and international markets. The company employs roughly 1400 people and has a number of brands, including CSBP, Kleenheat, Australian Gold Reagents, EVOL LNG, ModWood, Australian Vinyls, and Decipher. WesCEF is part of Wesfarmers Limited, one of Australia’s largest publicly-listed companies.
For more information, visit wescef.com.au.
For more information • Cisco HyperFlex • Cisco Intersight • Cisco OTV • Intel Optane SSDs
With aging infrastructure systems and little to no storage capacity, Andrew Weighell was bracing for a serious hardware failure. And he feared it would happen in the middle of the night. “Our two data centers were at full capacity,” the interim chief information officer for WesCEF recalls, citing years of business growth. “If one went down, we would have been forced to ration capacity for our businesses. Nobody wants to be the one picking and choosing which applications—and which businesses—get to stay online.” WesCEF’s IT team must support the technology needs of multiple business entities, several of which operate 24 hours a day and all of which rely heavily on core ERP applications like JD Edwards. If the performance of those applications suffer, it can affect WesCEF’s inventory tracking, transaction processing, and truck dispatching capabilities.
The time was ripe for a data center refresh.
“It’s not as if there was something wrong with what we had. We loved our Cisco UCS servers,” says Adem Cahtarevic, technology systems manager for WesCEF. “We just needed more capacity and better disaster recovery.”
“We also saw an opportunity to simplify everything,” adds Elliot Segler, senior cloud engineer at WesCEF.
“We’ve been all-virtual since 2003 and were ready for the next phase of virtual storage, so we decided to look into hyperconverged infrastructure.”
After evaluating several solutions, WesCEF chose Cisco HyperFlex with Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Intel Optane SSDs. “We wanted a platform that could span both of our data centers and wouldn’t require us to make application changes,” Weighell says. “Other solutions would have forced us to re-IP our legacy systems, some of which are 15 years old.”
WesCEF installed five-node Cisco HyperFlex clusters in each of its data centers and was able to stretch its Layer 2 domain across both sites using Cisco OTV. Integrated with Veeam Availability Suite, the active/active data centers provide synchronous data replication and seamless disaster recovery (DR). Backups that used to take 23 hours now take two hours1, and in the event of a failure, the entire environment can recover in 60 seconds1. “The integration between Cisco HyperFlex and Veeam is a game changer,” says Cahtarevic. “With the data centers now being active/active, we have full DR without having to pay for and maintain a dedicated DR facility.”
In addition to providing more consistency and resiliency, Cisco HyperFlex has delivered unanticipated levels of performance and capacity. Much of that is due to the platform’s deduplication and compression features that are tightly coupled with Intel Optane SSDs.
“To be honest, we didn’t quite believe the performance and capacity numbers we had heard, but they turned out to be conservative,” Weighell says. “Application latency is now consistently under four milliseconds1, which is mind blowing, especially with the number of VMs we have.”
“We had estimated how much more CPU and storage we’d get with the deduplication and compression technology, but it’s far more than we expected,” Segler adds.
Using Cisco Intersight, WesCEF now manages its two physical data centers as one logical environment. But according to company leaders, the platform is largely automated and hands-off. “We used to check our capacity on a daily basis. Now we look once every few months,” says Cahtarevic. “Cisco Intersight provides intelligent monitoring and proactive alerts, so we don’t have to spend all of our time in dashboards worrying about the blinking lights.” Instead, the WesCEF IT team has shifted its focus to business enablement. From digital twin and analytics technologies to sensor plug-and-play and fluid edge computing to multicloud strategies that provide additional workload flexibility, the team now has the time and infrastructure to support whatever WesCEF’s brands may need. “We are thrilled with the enhancements and opportunities these technologies will bring WesCEF. They’ll help us improve business performance, drive operational efficiency, and focus on strategic outcomes,” Weighell says. “Cisco HyperFlex is easy to deploy, simple to manage, and offers superior performance. It’s the heart of our technology environment, and we trust it to run all of our critical infrastructure.”
Explore more Cisco Data Center Compute customer success stories at cs.co/dccstories.
Cisco and Intel work together to optimize solutions from the edge, through the network, to the data center. Cisco’s innovative UCS servers and HyperFlex hyperconverged solutions, powered by Intel Xeon processors, Intel Optane technologies, and Intel Ethernet products, provide high performance with low cost, simplified operations, advanced security features, and a modern data center. Customers can benefit from joint, scalable solutions, designed to solve key market challenges in multiple industries. Together, Cisco and Intel create a trusted ecosystem for hardware, software, and services that bring intelligence and analytics to your business.
1Source: As reported by WesCEF from an interview and data provided in 2020. Software and workloads used in performance tests may have been optimized for performance only on Intel microprocessors. Performance tests, such as SYSmark and MobileMark, are measured using specific computer systems, components, software, operations and functions. Any change to any of those factors may cause the results to vary. You should consult other information and performance tests to assist you in fully evaluating your contemplated purchases, including the performance of that product when combined with other products. For more complete information visit www.intel.com/benchmarks. Your costs and results may vary. Intel does not control or audit third-party data. You should consult other sources to evaluate accuracy. Results have been estimated or simulated. No product can be absolutely secure. © 2020 Intel Corporation, Cisco Systems Inc. All rights reserved. Intel, the Intel logo, and other Intel marks are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries. Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. To view a list of Cisco trademarks, go to this URL: www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1110R)
