Vinchin provides high scalability for PetroChina’s backup architecture

With Vinchin Backup & Recovery, our backup processes are now running successfully, predictably, and smoothly. Even our data has increased to over 50TB and we have now 300+ virtual machines, we can achieve the high scalability on data protection with Vinchin Backup Server and extendable Nodes, to help us decentralize the workloads of overwhelming backup and recovery tasks. Besides, data deduplication and BitDetector helped us reduce storage space, handle backups more efficiently, and save our costs on hardware a lot.

Mr. Wang, IT Manager

The PetroChina Company Limited

Business Challenge

PetroChina Company Limited (PetroChina) is the largest oil and gas producer and distributor, playing a dominant role in the oil and gas industry in China. PetroChina was established as a joint-stock company on November 5, 1999, as part of the restructuring of CNPC. It is not only one of the companies with the biggest sales revenue in China, but also one of the largest oil companies in the world. PetroChina is committed to the principle of steady development and pushes the strategies of resources, markets, internationalization, and innovation with the aim to build a world-class international energy company. In 2019, PetroChina was ranked 22nd in Forbes Global 2000, a list of top listed companies of the world.

PetroChina commits itself to become an international energy company with strong competitiveness and one of the major producers and distributors of petroleum and petrochemical products in the world. It engages in a wide range of activities related to oil and natural gas, including exploration, development, production, and marketing of crude oil and natural gas, etc. A range of products and sales businesses are built on strong data support, critical to its operations, data availability and integrity are not only fundamental to business success but also ensure that the brand doesn't lose its hard-earned reputation.

“Data is the core of PetroChina's business, hence data protection is our biggest priority. we have more than 50 TB of data and over 300 virtual machines running on our VMware infrastructure, our previous data protection solution was slow and complicated. With the growth of business data, we gradually recognized we were putting critical IT systems at risk. Since any disruption to data availability will bring our business-critical functions to a halt and throw the entire supply chain off track. We started to think of switching to a more efficient data protection solution that would reliably protect the company's digital processes and keep pace with the growing requirements." Says Mr. Wang, the IT Manager at PetroChina Company Limited.

Vinchin Solution

The challenging task quickly narrowed down the selection of possible providers. After intensive testing, PetroChina finally decided to use Vinchin Backup & Recovery to protect its data. “In addition to the powerful functions of the solution and the good integration with VMware, the great commitment of Vinchin really impressed us,” says Mr. wang. “The manufacturer's technical experts worked with us to discuss a solution architecture that we could use to handle a large number of VMs and enormous data volume.”

PetroChina implemented Vinchin Backup & Recovery as a backup solution for its virtualized infrastructure based on VMware. Focus on their amount of data， Vinchin provides a useful solution that is Data Deduplication and Compression. "Vinchin Backup & Recovery has built-in capabilities with Deduplication and Compression to help us achieve Data Efficiency and satisfy any security requirements for efficient data storage. Data will be deduplicated and Compressed before writing to the backup storage, to reduce the backup size that allows us to manage information flow better, and let us store data efficiently without eating up our budget. "

PetroChina implemented Vinchin Backup & Recovery to protect its VMware infrastructure successfully with the support from Vinchin team. We also provided some suggestions on backup task configurations. To distribute the data flow during backup, we helped Mr. Wang and his team deploy a few Vinchin backup nodes in each VMware cluster to co-work with Vinchin backup server. “Backup node is really a great component to help us extend our backup architecture, we can achieve high scalability easily without paying any extra expenses on the Vinchin backup license, coz Vinchin backup node is totally free, which is a plus point I really like,” says Mr. wang.

To make the backup process more efficient, we recommended the team to enable data deduplication and BitDetector, get the backup data size as small as possible during transfer, thus to save them a lot of time on backing up their VMs, meanwhile, also reduced the backup storage space and saved costs on hardware devices. I‘m very impressed by Vinchin data deduplication and BitDetector features, data will be deduplicated before writing to the backup storage, also we don’t need to back up useless data so that to reduce the backup size that allows us to manage information flow better, and let us store data efficiently without eating up our budget.” says Mr. Wang.

Result

“The Company continues to improve its overall strength, international competitiveness, and sustainable development. With Vinchin Backup & Recovery we now have a centralized backup solution to protect our digital business processes from planning, to production and sales and to bring the availability of all applications to a higher level, rewarding shareholders, and society by achieving a satisfactory performance.” Says Mr. Wang.