4Gas Experts on Securing Liquefied Natural Gas Successfully Secure Data in a Hyper-V Installation

4Gas offers gas consumers and suppliers an attractive and secure alternative to pipeline gas. 4Gas connects producers and off-takers of gas through the import, storage and regasification of liquefied natural gas (LNG), a colorless, odorless, non-corrosive and non-toxic gas. Based in the Netherlands, the company is developing terminals in continental Europe, North America and Asia and is in the unique position to serve markets on both sides of the Atlantic Basin and in Asia. As the fastest growing LNG exporter and provider, 4Gas was forced to address under utilized and overly complex data storage issues that were causing spiraling IT costs.

With a limited IT budget and an outdated environment of stand-alone servers and archaic storage, 4Gas turned to SJ Solutions to design a viable storage management environment that would ensure reliable backup and recovery. 4Gas also needed a solution that centralized storage management, allowed them to utilize all of their existing storage, and included tools to provide meaningful cost visibility to their customers. The specialists at SJ knew moving to a fully virtualized infrastructure would give 4Gas the scalability, management and operational efficiencies their growing storage required.

SJ Solutions designed a workflow solution based on CommVault®, Windows® XP Professional, and Windows Small Business Server 2003 along with solutions from Hyper-V. As a result 4Gas is able to capture and organize their data to facilitate smoother workflow and a faster response to their international clients with greater efficiency and ease. By virtualizing their storage with the iQstor iQ2880T FC, SJ Solutions was able to provide improved service levels at a significantly lower price managed on workstations running Microsoft Windows.

4Gas is now employing a completely virtual workflow, through data management services and organization on the iQ2880T. Professional workstations are networked over a high speed gigabit Ethernet LAN to a centralized image management server running Windows Small Business Server 2008. Each workstation is equipped with Microsoft Office Professional 2003 with CommVault for daily data backup. Four TB FC disk drives provide both main and backup storage for mission critical applications. They manage their software from the iQ2880T using virtualization software with Microsoft Hyper-V. Transferring data from headquarters in The Netherlands is simplified with the feature rich iQ2880T. 4Gas can now safely transport and restore liquefied natural gas and their critical business data to better serve their global clients.