Nutanix > Case Studies > Total Powers Digital Transformation in Energy Production with Nutanix

Total Powers Digital Transformation in Energy Production with Nutanix

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Private Cloud
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Public Cloud

Applicable Industries

Oil & Gas
Transportation

Applicable Functions

Logistics & Transportation
Maintenance

Use Cases

Construction Management
Infrastructure Inspection

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
System Integration

The Customer

Total SA

About The Customer

Total S.A. is a French multinational company and one of the largest energy producers in the world. Its businesses cover the entire oil and gas supply chain, 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. 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.

The Challenge

Total S.A., a French multinational energy company, is one of the largest energy producers in the world. Its operations span the entire oil and gas supply chain, 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 these operations, Total’s IT environment runs a wide variety of applications on premises, as well as extensive public and private cloud environments, including Microsoft Azure. The company needed a consistent platform and management for all of its sites, regardless of size. Some offices contain as few as three people, while others may support up to 1000 employees. The organization needed a strategic solution that would position the organization 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.

The Solution

Total embarked on a digital transformation journey, focusing initially on modernizing its siloed data center. The company adopted the Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution and is now extending its environment across its global sites. The Nutanix HCI solution allows Total to avoid the time and costs associated with managing multiple OEM environments, while providing both flexibility and support for standardization. Total employs a full range of Nutanix solutions across its sites, including all of its North American operations. Over the next three years, the company will continue to ramp up its Nutanix environment to enable additional sites and services, optimizing costs using the solution together with other solutions. Total’s goal is to deploy AHV hypervisor 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.

Operational Impact

Deploying Nutanix solutions together with technologies from other vendors contributes to provide IT efficient solutions to the Total Group, by ensuring the reliability and performance of IT services required to maintain its business leadership in the challenging energy production space. 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. Streamlining administration and enhancing automation has also enabled Total to optimize operational costs, including maintenance and resources required to support its operations. Nutanix solutions also 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.

Quantitative Benefit

Reduced TCO significantly through standardization of the solutions and their management
Provided flexibility to rapidly deploy and allocate computing resources to new energy production Sites and Services
Enabled dependable IT operations for three years without service outages to the customers