Mining company Anglo American was looking for an environment that could handle heterogeneous processing periods – with spikes and low demand – as well as unified management of data centre components – at its Minas-Rio iron ore operations in Brazil. The project was achieved based on Dell’s private cloud solution, which centralised the administration of the environment and reduced incidents that were occurring across the two critical data centres.
The mining company operates Minas-Rio with two data centres that monitor the entire production system – one is located next to the Conceição do Mato Dentro iron ore mine in Minas Gerais, the other is at the end of the iron ore transport pipeline, at the port of São João da Barra, in Rio de Janeiro.
The Anglo American project consolidated servers, storage systems and switches, unifying management in the concept of hyperconvergence with Dell EMC VxRail, which has become the foundation of Anglo American’s private cloud. The adoption of VxRail was suggested by Anglo American’s Global Information Technology Architecture team.
In this endeavour, the identification of this opportunity was made by a consultancy specialised in digital innovation, Portnet Tecnologia, which is Dell’s business partner that serves Anglo American. The project was created by Dell in conjunction with Portnet, and the implementation of the hyperconvergence solutions was carried out by professionals from Dell itself.
“These two data centres are extremely critical, receiving and processing data produced throughout the entire iron ore extraction chain, from the pressure of the pumps, volume in the ore pipelines, to the life of the equipment and trucks and finally, details of the shipping of the ore at the port. Applications running in these data centres perform predictive analysis and generate alerts in case of possible problems,” says Clebecy Santana, Industrial IT Coordinator at Anglo American.
Data centres also process laboratory data about the ore’s compliance with customer specifications. “With the adoption of hyperconvergence, all information from the sensors is now consolidated on centrally managed servers, in a fail-safe structure with data replication on both sites,” says Santana.
The possibility of Anglo American Brazil making this leap towards the hyperconverged structure arose from the use of this technology by Anglo American in London, United Kingdom, the company’s global headquarters. The professionals at the company’s headquarters asked their Brazilian peers to examine the possibility of applying this concept in the data centres of Conceição do Mato Dentro and São João da Barra. At the end of this evaluation process, the project was developed and the system was implemented in eight months.
Anglo’s data centres already had virtualised services with VMWare and VSAN and the concept of hyperconvergence has dramatically reduced the complexity of managing third-party databases, applications and software. The management of all elements of the two data centres is now carried out from a single point of monitoring and control, which reduces incidents such as systems being down and the risk of lack of space for data storage.
Hyperconvergence is not a product, but a processing concept made up of Dell’s VxRail and Data Domain, which unifies virtualised solutions. Dell Data Domain is a backup system that automatically specifies the size of the storage space required according to the volume of data. The server reads quickly and is prepared to recover large amounts of data in both data centres.
“In addition to this layer of protection, all data is recorded on LTO tape for an extra backup,” explains Santana. Another feature of hyperconvergence is RecoverPoint. In a normal backup, data recovery is done by period (hours or days) and is not always complete. RecoverPoint allows you to restore data on the timeline in a configurable way, making the transfer of data between the public and private cloud without loss of information. In addition, data is replicated bidirectionally across the two data centres. The databases hosted in Conceição do Mato Dentro (MG) and São João da Barra (RJ) are replicated from one site to another through a database tool. Everything that is processed in one datacentre is saved and sent as a backup to the other.
“The concept of hyperconvergence is well suited to the private cloud because it consolidates hardware and software, which are automatically updated, through the unified administration provided by Dell,” explains Gilbert Emmanuel, responsible for Portnet’s hyperconvergence business area. “The fact that Anglo American uses hyperconvergence to raise the maturity level of two data centres focused on Industrial IT data processing is something very innovative, a highlight in our country’s digital economy.”
