KUWAIT CITY, Kuwait — Kuwait National Petroleum Company (KNPC), a subsidiary of the State-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, has completed a large-scale upgrade of its data center infrastructure based on Oracle SPARC T4 and M9000 servers. KNPC runs Kuwait's oil refining and gas liquefaction operation in addition to distributing petroleum products in Kuwait through a chain of filling stations. The project was integral to the strategy of the KNPC IT department to fulfil its vision to add value to the core business and jointly transform KPC Downstream into a digitally intelligent corporation. The additional data center capacity and scalability is needed to accommodate the immediate-future requirements of corporate applications as well as the anticipated increased data load associated with the building of its new refinery and the roll-out of its clean fuel project. The additional capacity and expandability provided by the new data center infrastructure will absorb the IT requirements of the new refinery, one of the largest strategic projects in the state of Kuwait with capacity for refining 615 000 barrels per day. The new refinery is intended to supply power generation plants in Kuwait with environment friendly fuel and provide an alternative for gas imports and heavy fuel consumption. In addition, the servers will support the upgrades planned for KNPC's Mina Abdulla and Mina Al-Ahmadi refineries, which will include installing reactors and vessels to process environmentally-friendly fuel with a low sulfur content. KNPC was able to reduce its real estate and power consumption by replacing old servers that had high power and cooling requirements with SPARC T4 servers running Solaris 11 with Oracle VM virtualization. “In the light of our growth, scalability was a critical factor when selecting Oracle,” said Abdulaziz Al-Duaij, Manager, Information Technology at KNPC. “We have seen a remarkable improvement in system performance, reliability and availability for our day to day business,” said Al-Duaij. “For example, we have cut our payroll run for our 7,000 employees from four hours to one hour. A second critical factor in our decision to go with Oracle was the strong presence of Oracle in Kuwait,” he added. “We have been working with Oracle for more than 20 years. Their sales, support and partner network in Kuwait is well established. We rely heavily on capable vendors and partners to support our growth.” — SG
