OREANDA-NEWS. October 19, 2012. IBS Group, a leading software development and IT services provider in Central and Eastern Europe, announces that IBS Platformix, a subsidiary of IBS IT Services, has completed development of a fault-tolerant virtualised computing platform for Linde Gas Rus, a Russian subsidiary of a world-leading supplier of industrial gases, providing the company with a state-of-the-art IT infrastructure to cater for its business needs over the next five years, reported the press-centre of IBS.

Initially, the company’s IT infrastructure was built on the server hardware that was aging and getting outdated. To support its operations, Linde Gas Rus began upgrading the infrastructure and changing over to a virtualised environment internally. However, the upgraded system had neither an integrated monitoring and control centre nor fault tolerance tools.

"On the one hand, we had specific tasks and needed a qualified and resourceful provider to complete them to the highest standard. On the other, our budget was rather tight. Thus we chose IBS Platformix as our solution provider meeting both our technical and financial requirements," says Sergey Sukhoverkhov, IT Director at Linde Gas Rus.

For Linde Gas Rus, it was critical to have a fault-tolerant IT infrastructure in place, mitigating, as much as possible, the risk of forced outage. The company set the following requirements:

24/7 failure-free continuous operation;

multi-layer backup of the system’s hardware and software resources;

elimination of potential critical failures resulting in an overall system failure or reducing them to a minimum;

automatic services and applications transfer to an alternative server in case of a failure of one of the fault-tolerant cluster servers;

an integrated monitoring system and an integrated control centre for fault-tolerant virtualisation resources;

data storage network providing for continuous operation of a virtualisation system.

Working on the project, IBS Platformix audited the company’s existing IT infrastructure, designed a new one, supplied Linde Gas Rus with all the necessary hardware and software components, launched a full-scale virtualised platform, upgraded the storage network and provided for its maintenance. IBS Platformix did comprehensive fault tolerance testing by shutting off the power sources, disconnecting the network, and checking performance of the implemented fault tolerance tools.

Fault tolerance of the IT infrastructure is achieved through two interchangeable clusters operating in separate networks but connected by multiple channels. The clusters are managed with a hypervisor; backup UPS units ensure continuous power supply. IBS Platformix has also done comprehensive fault tolerance testing by shutting off the power sources, disconnecting the network, and checking performance of the implemented fault tolerance tools.

The technology platform is based on HP, EMC, APC, Cisco, and VMware solutions.

To complete the project, Linde Gas Rus technicians were trained to work with the new IT infrastructure.