WATERSTONS COMPLETES SWISS CONTRACT
April 2010

Waterstons has completed a project worth over £120,000 for Europe’s leading independent refiner and wholesaler of petroleum products, Petroplus.

Waterstons have worked with the UK arm of Petroplus since 1999 and after building a solid relationship with the multinational, were asked to complete a server virtualisation project at their European headquarters in Zug, Switzerland.

Sally Waterston commented “We have worked with Petroplus in the UK for a number of years, we consider it to be a privilege that we were asked to work for such a prestigious client at their European headquarters.”

Petroplus Europe identified an initial requirement to improve facilities for development and test versions of their key business trading systems.  Rather than purchasing additional servers, Petroplus Europe decided to follow the lead of their UK colleagues by opting for server virtualisation.

Virtualisation involves taking multiple servers and bringing them together to run from only one physical host server. Petroplus Europe have enjoyed significant financial savings in the form of a reduction in initial hardware costs, maintenance costs, power and cooling costs as a result of the virtualisation project undertaken by Waterstons.

Petroplus can now increase their server capacity quickly and easily with minimal additional cost, as required, because the virtual infrastructure is much more flexible than traditional physical servers.

The infrastructure put in place by Waterstons also eliminates all single points of failure in order to ensure that in the event of a hardware problem Petroplus could continue to operate without interruption.Following the successful migration of development and test versions of Petroplus’ key systems, multiple live systems were moved to the same virtual solution.

Waterstons have since returned to Switzerland to extend the solution with a disaster recovery replica at a second Swiss datacentre fifty kilometres away from Petroplus’ headquarters. This provides a live second copy of key systems, and ensures that even in the case of a real disaster at the company’s headquarters; time needed to recover critical systems is minimal.