East Resources, Inc., established in 1983, is an independent exploration and development company with land holdings of over 1.25 million acres. East Resources owns and operates over 2,400 producing oil and gas wells in New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Colorado and has active exploratory drilling programs underway in the Rockies.

At a Glance

·   Industry: Oil and gas exploration and development

·   Headquarters: Warrendale, Pennsylvania

·   Founded: 1983

·   Employees: 250

·   Land holdings: Over 1.25 million acres

·   Oil production: 3,500 barrels a day

·   Processing capabilities: 20 million ft3 a day of natural gas

·   Clients: Residents and businesses in seven states

·   Website: http://eastresourcesinc.com

Challenges

East Resources is the largest oil producer in the Appalachian Basin, producing approximately 3,500 barrels of oil daily. They continue to actively develop acreage positions in all of its operating areas.

East Resources has experienced tremendous growth and its small IT department was working hard to keep up with the pace of data growth. The three-person team was managing a demanding array of databases and building servers for data-intensive applications – including Oracleâ, Microsoftâ, SQL Serverâ, GIS software, mapping tools, billing software, and Munsysâ software – that provide an interface for many of the other applications. The amount of data had doubled in size during 2008 from the previous year and was expected to double again in 2009.

In addition to the this high growth, the company rapidly increased non-IT headcount by 17 percent to support exploration and drilling efforts in development of Marcellus Shale in the Appalachian Basin, which may contain enough natural gas to supply the U.S. for 20 years. It was a shift that put even more strain on their systems through lots of new data. “A single 3-D set of seismic data can be 4 to 5 gigabytes,” explains Jason McNutt, IT Manager for East Resources.

To meet their storage needs, East Resources initially had just three, 1 TB Dellâ PowerVault™ 745N NAS devices, which sufficed for a short time. “They filled up fast,” says McNutt. Then East Resources started using Dell servers with six hard drives apiece, which they thought would last. Those ran out of space in one year. “We had to buy more and more servers, which led to more management overhead,” laments McNutt. Eventually, the company was operating 15 different devices, and increasing hardware devices by more than 13 percent per year. They were also using EMC® Retrospect® and a Dell TL8000 autoloader for backup, which filled up 3TB in just three weeks. The environment was a challenge to manage, the backup process overhead was time consuming and there was no respite in sight.

Maintaining so many systems was a time-consuming process that taxed the small IT department, and running out of storage capacity was not an option. It was clear that the infrastructure needed to dramatically change to enable the company to go to the next level.

The Solution

McNutt and Rob Neal, systems administrator, began looking for a centralized solution to transform the department from one that was heavily reliant on physical systems and resources to a more virtual and, therefore, more flexible system. Partly because the department is staffed so lean, they wanted less physical boxes to maintain along with more speed and efficiency in the management of systems.

The IT team recognized the need to upgrade their technology infrastructure to one that was scalable to grow along with their business’ demands. The existing system was too labor-intensive and was pushing the performance envelope to meet existing data needs, much less future requirements. East Resources also wanted to consolidate first: they needed a solution to bring all the data together, reduce the number of physical servers, save space, speed up deployment and facilitate deployment of multiple operating systems. “We had lots of data on various servers and needed to consolidate for management purposes, so we wanted to go with a SAN,” recounts McNutt. The data backup approach also needed to be restructured appropriately for their improved infrastructure.

Once East Resources made the decision to move to a centralized solution, they began reading reviews of the many systems on the market and looking at technology websites for in-depth comparisons. Like most companies operating in today’s economy, East Resources had a set budget number for their technology upgrade. East Resources wanted an enterprise-class system. “We did not want to spend $300,000 on a SAN, but all of the products we found in our price range had single controllers,” explains McNutt.

Despite the budget constraints, the team investigated and compared enterprise-class systems from EMC, Dell EqualLogic and others against their SAN criteria. NEC valued reseller StoreHouse Technologies introduced East Resources to the NEC D-Series, which was in their price range. McNutt and Neal discovered additional information in their research. “We learned that NEC was manufacturing products for EMC and RAID Inc.,” says McNutt. “The NEC product has impressive features. It’s comparable to the EMCs and the EqualLogics, and the reviews of the product are very good.”

East Resources thought they found a winner and wanted a closer look. “We realized that it was essentially the same as the EMC,” declares Neal. NEC’s No Risk Storage 100 percent satisfaction guarantee program encouraged East Resources to bring in the product and try it in their own environment. “We started testing and we were very satisfied – it was everything we were looking for in a SAN,” exclaims McNutt.

Results

In just three months, East Resources evaluated, selected, and installed new systems, which eliminated the challenges of server-based storage by deploying the power of NEC. “Now, NEC is the heart of our data center,” says McNutt. East Resources is running Oracle, SQL Server, an accounting database, inventory management software, Microsoft Exchange, as well as GIS and Mapping programs on the SAN.

East Resources is running VMware in production and can now take better advantage of its capabilities. IT can automatically bring up a virtual machine on another host quickly in the event of trouble or when provisioning a new server. “Because we are running on a SAN, the system automatically brings up a replacement virtual machine on another host,” explains Neal. As far as redundancy goes, if a server fails, the IT team can bring up another one in mere seconds. Adds McNutt, “The end user won’t even see the drop in service. We can lose an entire host and they won’t know it.” Before the NEC deployment, if a server needed to be rebooted, it took down other parts of the system, affecting the productivity of at least 40 people.

NEC’s technology has generated greater, faster performance than East Resources expected as well. McNutt says the NEC system enables the fastest database he’s ever built: “You can jus see the data fly.” In fact, the database moved 1.5 GB of data in eight seconds, from the local drive to the SAN. The speed of copying files across the network has also increased, from between 900 MB per minute and 1.2 GB per minute to 2.5 GB per minute with the SAN. Because all of the software shares are now on the SAN, East Resources can deploy applications and build systems faster.

East Resources relies heavily on the availability of the latest real-time data for its operational needs. Previously, refreshing the databases meant 45 to 90 minutes of downtime because of the interactions between all four databases. So, the refresh had to be done at night. Since the Oracle and SQL Server databases have been moved onto the SAN, East Resources is now able to refresh the databases in just five minutes and the data can be updated during the business day. McNutt says, “Now, I’m considering refreshing the databases twice daily.”

NEC’s D-Series SAN Storage has quadrupled the speed of restoring desktops and laptops. The IT team is backing up and snapshotting laptops and desktops to the SATA drives of the SAN so they can quickly and easily image a replica of the latest backup, instead of going to tape backup. It saves time for both IT and the user. “We’ve actually had laptops run over by trucks,” exclaims McNutt. “Now we can get desktops and laptops up in two hours instead of eight.”

Server backup performance has also improved dramatically by using the SAN for disk-to-disk backup. “We’ve doubled the speed of backup,” says McNutt. “At one point we were getting 300 MB a minute off of the backup server. Now we’re getting 1200 to 1500 MB a minute.”

From a cost and budgeting standpoint, the ability to plan out technology purchases beyond five years has led to better financial decisions. “I haven’t been able to purchase a server that could last five years, but now I have SAN storage that can last for five years,” reports McNutt. East Resources has about 50 TB of raw capacity, and can continue to grow the system up to 144 TB of capacity.

Server sprawl and growth has stopped, which also eliminates the need to buy software and OS licenses for each system. Management time has also been greatly reduced. The IT team is fully supporting 160 people in addition to 30 servers (many of which virtual) across multiple locations. East Resources has gone from 19 separate servers in the datacenter to a virtualized environment of four VMware ESX physical hosts and one VCenter management server. Not only can they deploy the small staff to other projects, they are reducing power usage as well. Plus, the company plans to repurpose its older servers and use them as domain controllers in remote offices.

“Instead of having a staff of administrators, we can just have three people to support 160 users and 200 PCs as well as 30 servers,” explains McNutt.

Future Plans

In addition to the tremendous business gains already realized with NEC’s D-Series SAN Storage, East Resources is excited about the ability to start a mapping project which, until now, had been on hold. The drilling and exploration company has a repository of old, valuable paper maps. Some of these documents are original, hand-drawn Pennzoil maps dating from the early 1800s that are very fragile. Thanks to the additionally capacity of the NEC SAN, East Resources plans to digitize these maps so that they will be available to all of the employees and preserved for the future.

The company also plans to accelerate its business. “Projects were put on hold because of lack of storage,” relates McNutt. The company plans to move a robust human resources database online, something they were unable to do with their previous system. And they plan to begin a data-warehousing project, to enable users to more easily search a catalogue to find their desired data.