Manufacturing
Case Study:
Hydrocarbon Resources
1 March 2007
Hydrocarbon Resources is a Centrica company tasked with operating and maintaining the UK's largest single gas producing fields at Morecambe Bay.
The operation is currently capable of supplying (at peak) approximately 25 million cubic metres of gas every day, which contributes to the overall Centrica Energy operation, which can currently supply around 8 per cent of the UK's peak gas demand - equivalent to over 1.5 million homes. Over 400 staff and contractors work for the Morcambe operation. All the locations are linked together in terms of IT and all locations have access to client workstations which are used for a number of applications including access to e-mail, drawings, maintenance and logistics systems.
In 1998 the decision was made to move away from a variety of desktop, network and server operating systems and protocols to a single operating platform running a single suite of network protocols. Windows NT4 running TCPIP was selected as the preferred desktop, server and networking infrastructure. This involved phasing out DEC (Compaq) MicroVax machines running VMS along with client machines running Windows 3.1.
Graeme Moorby, senior systems analyst for Hydrocarbon Resources, says: "We were already acutely aware of the destructive problems caused by disk defragmentation as we had experienced performance issues previously on our VMS systems which, after installation of Diskeeper were almost eradicated. We also had an increasing number of problems with our Windows-based systems, whose performance was deteriorating over time. Although many client disk defragmentation solutions existed at the time these often involved visits by support personnel to perform manual defrags, which was time-consuming, impractical and costly. The decision was made to deploy Diskeeper, the market leader in automatic defragmentation software, on every server and workstation from the outset of our deployment of Windows NT. We had already noticed a great improvement in results on our VMS systems in terms of system speed and reliability. With the deployment of Windows NT, we could install Diskeeper on all Windows clients also, meaning that we had an automatic defragmentation solution across our entire network. By doing this we could remotely schedule and manage client machines regardless of location which in turn saved many hours in support to the end user. For us it was essential to maximise file performance on all Windows clients and servers in order to adhere to our 20 per cent each year on a five year rolling replacement programme. Having a small support team it was also very important to reduce support and to ensure that we had an easy method of managing, maintaining and keeping the programme updated. Diskeeper, through the use of a separate administration console, was the perfect solution allowing us to achieve all this and more. The network now operates with a combination of Diskeeper Server Enterprise and Diskeeper Server Standard on the servers with Diskeeper Professional installed on each of the 420 workstations sitewide."
According to Moorby: "Diskeeper has not only vastly improved the performance of our systems in terms of speed and reliability but it has also significantly reduced the number of support problems we used to have related to poor performance with clients. This has ultimately led to a cost saving on three fronts - firstly due to reduced expenditure on system support, higher productivity and thirdly by extending the life of our hardware. We have also used Diskeeper on a number of our Pentium II 400MHz file and print servers from day one and now, eight years on, they are still performing well within their capabilities. As our systems have developed we have maintained our use of Diskeeper and fully utilise the added reporting functionality. These reports identify when there is low disk space as well as the level of fragmentation on the pagefile and MFT. This data is fed directly into our support team who are then able to proactively target machines and take remedial action before the users become aware of these issues. We also make use of the Smart Scheduling feature which automatically determines the optimum defragmentation schedule for each volume, and then runs this in the background." Moorby said that the methods of defragmentation are very flexible, by taking advantage of the primary and secondary scheduling settings, or by utilising the Smart Scheduling feature. All these can be further controlled by selecting the amount of CPU resource that can be utilised meaning that, importantly, end users are totally unaware of the entire process.
Moorby's experiences with Diskeeper have been universally positive. "From the outset we have had a great account relationship," he says. "Diskeeper Corporation also seems to be able to retain their staff, meaning that both companies benefit from the stability of this account. We have always been able to approach Diskeeper and make proposals in terms of how we utilise and license the product. These proposals have always been accepted and reviewed before eventually reaching an agreement. Technical support too has always been first class and quick to respond to any issues we have had. This is something that you don't always appreciate when you first buy a software product but is absolutely critical down the line as issues do occur and in order to keep operations running smoothly, it is imperative that they are resolved quickly. We have also now utilised their other products and are equally happy with Undelete and Sitekeeper."