Baytex Energy Maximizes Technology with Raven Bay

About the Customer:

Baytex Energy Trust is a Calgary, Alberta based conventional oil and gas trust engaged in the acquisition, development and production of oil and natural gas in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin. The trust also has an emerging presence in the United States. Their crude oil and natural gas operations are organized into Canadian Heavy Oil, Canadian Light Oil and Gas and United States business units. Within these business units, Baytex has established a total of eight geographically organized teams with a full complement of technical professionals (engineers, geoscientists and landmen) within each team.

Challenges:

Baytex had an outdated distributed infrastructure that could not keep up with the growth of the company and an inadequate backup solution that did not protect the enterprise. The infrastructure maintenance costs were outstripping the business value they were receiving from their technology. It was time to consolidate their infrastructure into a virtual environment. In addition, with unreliable backups and non-existent disaster recovery capabilities, they also wanted to build a disaster recovery solution.

Business Needs:

Baytex decided to build a brand new environment based on virtualized servers, new storage to replace their end-of-lease, poorly performing equipment, and a new software solution. They also wanted a reliable business continuity plan implementing replication architecture across two sites.

Business Solution:

Baytex chose an end-to-end solution from IBM and enjoyed the architecture and implementation expertise of IBM and Raven Bay personnel who covered the entire skill scope of their project: AIX, General Parallel File System (GPFS), BladeCenter, System Storage DS4000, SAN Volume Controller (SVC), Cisco SAN, N Series, VMware, Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), site-to-site replication. Their new infrastructure solution consisted of:

• Servers: IBM BladeCenter w/ HS22 and JS12 blades, IBM Power 6 (Power 550, Power 520)
• SAN/Storage: IBM N Series Gateway 6040, SVC w/ DS4700 disk subsystems, Cisco MDS 9134, Fibre Channel Internet Protocol (FCIP) routing, LTO-4 Tape Library TS3310
• ·Software: TSM v6.1, dual-site replication, Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP), SVC, TPC, Ontap, SnapMirror dual-site replication, SnapManager (virtual infrastructure), AIX, GPFS, VMware

Business Results:

The robust new solution gives Baytex a new, easy-to-manage solution that offers built-in flexibility and better growth capabilities, along with an easy migration path for the future. They are taking full advantage of their powerful new hardware, improved performance and the virtualization features introduced by the SAN Volume Controller. The Business Continuity plan takes fully advantage of the mirroring capabilities. The enterprise backup solution also allows site-to-site replication, providing electronic vaulting for long-term retention of the data, whereas in the meantime, the NSeries Snapshot technologies can be used for instant restore. As a result of the trusted relationship that developed, Baytex has extended its post-implementation work with Raven Bay and has also launched two new projects: VOIP support and Sametime implementation.

Raven Bay fit us like a glove. They care enough about our environment to make sure we are leveraging all of our technology to our best advantage. For example, I had purchased high end graphical solution I hadn’t yet implemented, and Raven Bay cared enough about my environment to say to me, “It’s time for you to start leveraging this environment.” It’s not just me telling them what I want; they make sure I am getting the most value from my technology investments. I appreciate the direct contact and close relationship they bring to the table and I look forward to our ongoing partnership.

– Don Cutting, IT Manager, Baytex Energy Ltd