Valero Energy Corp., North America’s largest refiner, has several of its 17 refineries located in coastal areas prone to severe weather. To ensure a ‘resilient’ IT infrastructure in case of disruption and to protect mission-critical applications and communications, Valero has deployed Windows Server 2008 with failover clustering to 90 users in its IT Infrastructure team. Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 has been deployed on a two-node failover cluster with a storage area network (SAN) for data storage. Each server has its own independent data and cluster disks. By activating the high-availability components of WS2008, Valero plans to improve server stability, reducing system recovery time from days to minutes and optimize hardware utilization and security.
Katrina
Following hurricane Katrina, Valero has strengthened its infrastructure with ‘cluster continuous replication’ and is now looking to deploy geographically dispersed failover clustering (geo-clustering).
Manager
To monitor and manage its systems and applications Valero is deploying Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 and Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003. Valero expects to upgrade to Microsoft Operations Manager 2007 next year. Valero also plans to deploy read-only Active Directory domain controllers (RODC) to minimize ‘at risk’ information at remote locations.
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