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Total Petrochemicals has opted for a highly centralized and consolidated IT-environment. The company optimized the use of its WAN with appliances from Riverbed. This allowed Total Petrochemicals to avoid major investments, but to still be able to offer end-users a better service. Belgacom provided the installation of the Riverbed components.

Total Petrochemicals is one of the largest petrochemical companies in the world. The company manufactures various base chemicals and related products such as polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene. Total Petrochemicals supplies these products to companies in the automotive, construction and packaging industries. Total Petrochemicals operates with a single centralized IT-department that supports all of the company’s strategic IT needs worldwide, while specific teams provide the local services. “We truly regard IT as a core activity,” says Paul Baldewyns, IT Manager at Total Petrochemicals.

The IT-department chose a highly standardized and centralized approach. Two mirrored datacenters in Brussels form the heart of the IT-activities. Naturally, in such a centralized IT-environment, the network plays a crucial role. Between the Belgian sites in Feluy, Antwerp and Brussels, Total Petrochemicals is also able to rely on a high-performance MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) that Belgacom installed for the company. Worldwide, the WAN (Wide Area Network) is utterly essential for the IT-support. Total Petrochemicals got Belgacom, among others, to help the company in order to optimize the use of the existing network.

Complete transformation

“Our IT-architecture is undergoing a complete transformation,” recounts Paul Baldewyns. From Feluy, Baldewyns directs a global team of 70 employees. They provide the IT-support for the entire company worldwide. “We want to increase the performance of the IT at the same time as making it more flexible as well. In this way, we want to be able to better respond to the business needs. Tackling the architecture was the first step in this plan.”
Total Petrochemicals reviewed the role of the datacenters, consolidated and virtualized the Unix-environment, designed a new Storage-architecture, developed a road map for SAP and redrafted all operational processes in function of making uninterrupted IT-support available worldwide, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. “In the next phase, we also took on the Windows-environment. In the first place, we are carrying out a major project to migrate all of our worksites to Vista by June 30, 2010. We also switched over to bladeservers, virtualized the Windows-servers with VMware and completely automated the management for the remote servers”, continues Paul Baldewyns.

Optimal use of the network

In order to allow the new approach to the Windows-environment to function successfully, the network had to be adapted as well. “We shifted away from the server fleet distributed throughout the world. Instead, we installed a central, consolidated and virtualized environment for each continent. That led to a sharp increase in the burden on the network, specifically in terms of capacity and response times.” For Total Petrochemicals, Belgacom created a WAN Optimization Solution based on Riverbed Steelhead-appliances. These allow Total Petrochemicals to avoid having to increase the bandwidth of its WAN, even though the use of the file servers and the great majority of the Windows-applications – as well as their back-up – for all of the users worldwide is now no longer run on local servers but through three continental environments on the WAN (Houston, Brussels, Singapore).

In this way, Total Petrochemicals avoided having to make a significant investment in the network. Nevertheless, the company was able to provide a higher level of service to the end user. “The consolidation and virtualization of the server fleet – and the optimization of the WAN – were an important step in our transformation process”, Baldewyns concluded.

Business benefits

The consolidation and virtualization of the Windows-environment led to a major reduction in costs for Total Petrochemicals. The server fleet is currently one-fifth its previous size. That represents savings of 30% over the traditional method of replacing servers. At the same time, the Riverbed appliances ensure that the company can make optimal use of the existing network bandwidth.

Company profile

Total Petrochemicals stands for the petrochemical activity of the Total Group. Some 2,300 of its 6,250 employees work in Belgium. In Feluy and Antwerp, Total Petrochemicals has two of its largest European production sites.

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