Devon Energy
Consolidates seismic software application from 25 Sun servers
to 17 Sun servers and StorEdge T3 Arrays
"Key factors in our decision really came down to Sun™s excellent
performance, scalability, flexibility and expandability."
Brad Whitley
Senior Network Engineer
Company
Industry/Market
Applications/Solutions
- Landmark Openworks software
- Sun's Solaris ™ Operating Environment, versions 2.6
- Sun's Solaris 7 Operating Environment
- Sun's Solaris 8 Operating Environment
- Jiro ™ technology
- Oracle databases
Products/Services
- Four Sun Enterprise ™ 4500 servers(6 CPU)
- Three Sun Enterprise 450 servers (4 CPU)
- Seven Sun Enterprise 420 servers (4 CPU)
- Three Sun Enterprise 220 servers
- One hundred Sun Blade(1000 workstation)
- Sun StorEdge ™ T3 arrays ((11 TB)
Key Business Goals
- Complexity and costs of managing different IT systems
- Provide effective computing for 3D seismic software
- Provide single vendor, integrated and expandable infrastructure
- Increase disk space and speed
Key Service Solutions
- Seamless scalability to support growth
- Consolidate from 25 to 17 servers
- Simplified and reduced administrative costs
- More than doubled performance
- Increased efficiency of 3D software
- Provide SAN-ready technology
Devon Energy Corporation is an independent
energy company involved in oil and gas
property acquisition, exploration, and production, and it ranks among the top five US
based oil and gas producers. Devon sells oil
and gas on the open market. In the last
several years, the company has grown
tremendously mostly through acquisitions
including Northstar Energy (1998),
PennzEnergy (1999), and Santa Fe Snyder
(2000).
Through these significant acquisitions, Devon has inherited a variety
of IT systems, whether owned or leased. The complexity of supporting
many different computing and storage systems was getting overwhelming
in terms of time,personnel,and cost,so Devon began to consider consolidating
and moving to a single vendor solution. "We wanted one vendor across
the board,so we could call one number and get anything fixed," said
Senior Network Engineer, Brad Whitley.
In addition, some of the systems were
outdated, and Whitley knew that more powerful and streamlined technology was available. Fortunately at the end of 2000, lease
expiration on many of Devon's systems
opened up a perfect opportunity to change
to new computing and storage systems.
"In late 2000, Devon purchased 17 Enterprise class Sun servers and
11 terabytes of disk space using Sun's StorEdge ™T3 disk arrays,"
said Whitley. "With this purchase, we doubled the current usable disk
space while in turn decreasing the number of servers by 47 percent.
This reduction was brought on by Sun's new disk technology and adding
Sun's Enterprise class servers. They allowed us to consolidate and
standardize across the board, which reduced administrative costs,
while still improving performance by more then 100 percent," added
Whitley.
These new Sun servers and storage systems were divided among Devon's
three key divisions:Corporate,Offshore, and International. Offshore
received the majority of the servers and disk space.
Devon Looks At Several Vendors, Then Chooses Sun
Prior to this big purchase ,Devon looked
extensively at hardware vendors, including
HP and Sun Microsystems, Inc., and several
storage vendors, including EMC,MTI,
Auspex, and Baydel. "The servers from the
top manufacturers all performed comparably, but one was three times the cost of Sun
and one had integration issues with our
existing Sun servers," explained Whitley.
"Salespeople can talk a lot of jargon, but
really when it comes down to it, their
numbers don't compete with Sun," Whitley
observed.
A key factor in deciding which server and
storage systems to buy, was how they
handled 3D rendering software and graphic
intensive applications. Devon uses
Landmark's Openworks, a suite of approximately 25 different applications specific to
the oil and gas industry. Within Openworks is a 3D seismic application which, along with well
logs and history, is commonly used to find oil.
According to Whitley, one of these pictures can be
5 gigabit large.
Devon Looks to Sun for Performance,
Flexibility,and Linear Scalability
Devon was very pleased with the improved performance of its Sun servers and storage.
"The Sun T3
arrays are 44 percent faster than the top performer
we tested, and they give 102 percent performance
gain over all of the old systems we used, "said
Whitley. "So, you can see that performance
improvements from going to the new Sun T3 arrays
are phenomenal, as well as having outstanding
performance in the current configuration. In addition, as we expand disk space,performance will
increase as well. I like to say that the Sun T3 arrays
have "progressive performance" meaning the
more disks you add to the system the faster it
becomes. This "progressive performance" is inherent because for every Sun T3 array you add, you
are adding backbone, controllers,connections, and
disks. This concept in storage is cutting edge and
in theory allows for infinite expansion," explained
Whitley.
In addition, this Sun solution helps Devon enable
highly scalable, complete end-to-end configurations with end-to-end system monitoring 24x7.
And, Sun programs such as Veritas, Oracle, Sun initiative (VOS) and SunTone™
services allow quick
problem resolution among vendors. Another
advantage is Sun's linear scalability. The common,
modular design of the Sun server family simplifies
upgrades and helps to deliver exceptional investment protection and performance.
The Sun Enterprise ™ server family is the industry's
only single, binary-compatible product line featuring a range of servers that scale from one to 64
processors and provide its customers with flexibility, investment protection,and an unparalleled
growth path. Designed for workgroup, departmental, and data center computing environments, the
Sun Enterprise server family provides an ideal
platform for a variety of applications, including
enterprise resource planning, electronic commerce, data warehousing, Internet/Intranet, and
customer management systems.
Whitley summed up Devon's decision. "Key factors in
our decision really came down to Sun's excellent performance, scalability, flexibility, and expandability."
Sun Helps Devon Build for the Future
The combination of new servers and new disks has
helped Devon dramatically consolidate its servers
while still providing outstanding quality of service
to its user community. This in turn reduced administration costs throughout the whole company
because there are fewer servers to manage. Now, Devon can focus on the future and become more
proactive than reactive." We are looking forward to our future growth instead of trying to catch up
with the latest acquisition. We are now ahead of
the curve and ready for the new growth spurt to
hit," added Whitley.
"We're planning to expand to 50 terabytes of storage in two years, "explained Whitley. "And we're
looking forward to upgrading without any downtime - in place upgrades are very nice!"
Devon easily reached one of its key goals: user
acceptance. "We wanted to get our user community to accept applications, databases, servers, and
that goal has gone over with flying colors. Users
are telling me how much faster and better their
applications run, without any prompting from me,"
beamed Whitley. "I would recommend Sun in a
heartbeat."
© 2001
Sun Microsystems,
Inc. All rights reserved.
Sun, Sun Microsystems,
the Sun Logo, Sun
Enterprise, Ultra,
Solaris, Sun Spectrum
Gold, and SunSpectrum
Silver are trademarks
or registered trademarks
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Inc. in the United
States and other
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