Nutanix Enables Freeport-McMoRan to Keep Global Mining Operations Running Safely and Efficiently Around the Clock

Nutanix Cloud Platform Simplifies Infrastructure Deployment and Management, Improves Remote Access for Development Engineers, and Supports On-Going Company Profitability

INDUSTRY

Mining

CHALLENGES

• Existing Cisco UCX and NetApp FlexPod solution was too complex, requiring skilled storage, server, and network personnel at each remote mining site.
• Wanted to find an IT solution that could run seamlessly both on-prem and in the cloud.
• Needed to provide engineers with remote access to high-end workstations during and after the pandemic.

SOLUTION

• Nutanix Cloud Platform
• Nutanix Frame
• Dell XC integrated systems

APPLICATIONS

• Process Control Network and Operational Technology applications.
• Ore sampling programs, drill control systems, and the local apps for dispatching and controlling mining vehicle fleets at each site.
• Microsoft SQL Server databases and associated applications, file servers, print servers, Microsoft SharePoint, and IT security systems.
• AutoCAD, and other 3D CAD applications.

BUSINESS BENEFITS

An upgrade from Cisco UCS and NetApp FlexPod environment to Nutanix Cloud Platform simplifies infrastructure design and maintenance at the company’s corporate datacenter and international mining locations. The Nutanix solution provides Freeport-McMoRan engineers with secure, remote access to their GPU-intensive applications, far better security and resiliency for their critical data, and a much-improved ability for teams to collaborate and share information across globally distributed remote sites, remote workers, and corporate offices.

CHALLENGE

Freeport-McMoRan is a leading international mining company, with significant proven and probable reserves of copper, gold, and molybdenum at mines around the world. “We operate in some of the most challenging places on the planet when it comes to Internet connectivity and resource availability, including the remote regions of Peru, Chile, and Indonesia,” explained Chuck Searle, Director Systems and Network Architecture at Freeport-McMoRan. “WAN connectivity is limited at many of our sites and relying on far-away corporate data centers is not feasible for our key mining operational and safety applications.”

Searle performs all of the architecture designs and layout for the Freeport-McMoRan side of the business, while Accenture serves as the company’s outsourced IT partner for implementation and infrastructure maintenance. “Working with an outsourced IT provider is a great way for us to deploy and maintain systems efficiently, and relying on a large team of external staff means everything must be designed for ease of deployment, operability, and maintainability,” explained Searle.

Supporting Mission-Critical Workloads

Searle and his team are responsible for supporting three different IT workloads at Freeport-McMoRan. The first consists of the company’s Process Control Network (PCN) and the Operational Technology (OT) applications at each mining site and processing plant, including a set of standard safety systems that control mining equipment pressures and temperatures. The processing plant IT environment at each mine is also air-gapped so it can’t be readily attacked by outside threats. “All of our PCN and OT applications have to be housed on-prem at each mine since we can’t rely on adequate connectivity or fiber that can be cut,” explained Searle. “If any of those applications go down, the entire mine has to stop until they are repaired.”

The second set of workloads includes a suite of ore sampling programs, drill control systems, and the local apps for dispatching and controlling mining vehicle fleets at each mining site. And finally, there is an administrative arm at each mine for business operations, including a suite of Microsoft SQL Server databases and associated applications, file servers, print servers, and IT security systems.

The third IT environment is split between two large datacenters in Arizona and Indonesia, and a virtual datacenter in the Cloud. These sites house all of Freeport-McMoRan’s corporate operations and financial workloads, including a collection of large SQL databases, file servers, and Microsoft SharePoint environments. The efficient running of all three IT environments is key to Freeport-McMoRan’s ongoing mine safety, efficiency, environmental and sustainability imperatives, and company profitability.

The Need for Higher Availability

Freeport-McMoRan had been running all of its corporate apps and mining operations on Cisco UCS servers and NetApp FlexPod infrastructure. “We were one of the first UCS and FlexPod large-scale customers, but that environment was very complex to deploy and maintain,” Searle admitted. “We needed to employ a NetApp specialist, a UCS blade specialist, and a networking person for the switches in between those systems at each mine. We needed to find a solution that was easier to use and maintain at our remote mining sites.”

SOLUTION

Choosing Nutanix for the Upgrade

When it came time to upgrade the legacy systems, Searle and his team decided to focus the search on hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). After reviewing the available options, they selected Nutanix for the upcoming upgrade. “Our first Nutanix build was in 2016,” Searle said. “We were so impressed with the ease of use and performance of that cluster that we replaced the rest of our legacy systems in 2017 and 2018.”

Deploying Nutanix on Dell XC Servers

After Searle created the runbook from the first Nutanix installation, Accenture rolled out the rest of the systems using the same setup and naming standards. With the help of Accenture, Freeport-McMoRan has now deployed over 270 Nutanix nodes running on Dell XC integrated systems. They deployed single clusters at the company’s mine tech and corporate operation sites, and dual Nutanix-based systems at their processing plants for redundancy. “If any of the mining operations and safety apps at our remote sites go down, we have to shut down the entire plant. The high reliability of the hyperconverged infrastructure is another reason we invested in Nutanix.”

CUSTOMER OUTCOME

Simplified Management

Freeport-McMoRan obtains IT support from Accenture for most of the installations and corporate-level work, but they still have technicians at every site. “Our local IT admins serve as the ‘hands and feet’ for the central Nutanix environment,” Searle explained. “They can install or replace a drive when needed, but that’s about all they have to do. We don’t need highly trained site personnel at each remote site to run the Nutanix environments, which is great because we can now redeploy those same resources for more value-added activities at the mines. By moving to Nutanix, the number of IT staff needed at each site to run the server rooms was easily cut in half.”

Eliminating Complex Patch Cycles

“With multiple vendors in the combined UCS and FlexPod environment, patch cycles were very challenging,” admitted Searle. “We’d have to create detailed spreadsheets to track who was updating each piece of equipment, what just became obsolete from the first patch, and then figure out what additional systems had to be upgraded to make it all work again. Those are the complexities that the Nutanix hyperconverged solution has removed from the entire operation.”

Providing Remote Access to Field Developers and Engineers with Frame

Freeport-McMoRan’s design engineers are tasked with building the company’s processing plants and identifying the location of new ore bodies. To perform their complex analyses, they are heavy users of 3D CAD tools including AutoCAD. These applications generate massive files that must be shared across large, geographically dispersed engineering teams. Before moving to Nutanix Frame, the engineers were using workstations with a lot of private data stores, but they needed a more robust, centralized way to store and share files.

“We looked at VDI many years ago, but it wasn’t cost-effective at that time on-prem,” noted Searle. “When the pandemic hit, our engineers were no longer able to access the high-end CAD workstations in our offices to access the GPU compute and video apps needed to do their processing. We also wanted to centralize the storage of all of their documents close to where their compute was, so we decided to put it all up into the cloud and did the pilot with Frame running on the Microsoft Azure environment.”

Freeport-McMoRan is now using Nutanix Frame to provide the company’s development engineers with remote access to a dynamic pool of high-end workstations. “We loved the simplicity and performance of Frame during the POC,” admitted Searle. “We are now running Frame in Azure and are centralizing the engineer’s datastores in the same Azure data center to achieve high performance. By using Frame, our engineers have much better control of their environments, far better security and resiliency for their critical data, and much-improved ability for their teams to collaborate and share info.”

Freeport-McMoRan has already deployed Frame to 120 engineers in Arizona and New Orleans, with plans to expand it to another 800 engineers later this year. “Another reason we chose Nutanix was to give our engineers unlimited flexibility to work from the office, at home, or at a mine site,” added Ketan Patel, VP Operational Systems and Infrastructure at Freeport-McMoRan. “We are still defining what the post-pandemic workforce will look like, probably a blend of working in the office and at home. But we want to give them the ability to obtain the same user experience regardless of location. With Nutanix, we have accomplished that goal.”

Better Security

“In addition to the Freeport-McMoRan employees at each site, there are thousands more that work for our partners,” said Searle. “As security is always a growing concern, I can now put those third-party personnel on a new Nutanix VDI cluster with Frame access just to the specific applications each group requires. That’s the beauty and flexibility of the Nutanix environment.”

Eliminating the Need to Purchase Thousands of High-End Workstations

“One of the downstream benefits of Frame is that we theoretically won’t have to purchase any more high-end desktops for our CAD engineers, since they can now access their applications with Frame on standard laptops,” Searle said. “So instead of paying $3,000 per developer workstation for the next refresh, it will only be about $1,200 each for the thousands of users that need to perform intensive GPU calculations.”

Lowering Risk with Nutanix Pulse

Freeport-McMoRan is also using Pulse, Nutanix’s predictive and proactive support service, to maximize infrastructure uptime, performance, and security. The centralized Nutanix Pulse information highlights any risk areas or potential issues in the IT environment and reports the findings back to Searle and his team. “I like the proactive nature of the Pulse service,” said Searle. “Nutanix sends us health alerts that say, ‘you’re in good shape now, but if you lose another node you are going to be at risk.’ It’s really nice to have a second set of eyes looking out for us, lowering the risk of any downtime in our systems.”

Scaling Analytics Quickly in the Cloud

“We have a lot of IoT systems that are streaming data and video up to our analytics applications in the cloud,” Searle shared. “This is the place where our team is starting to provide the most value to our company ─ finding ways to optimize our operations and determining what works best across sites. Our new analytics capabilities have been transformative for the company, but the demand for these compute-intensive applications fluctuates as new projects are started and must scale quickly on demand. That’s why we use a combination of on-prem and cloud deployments. We can spin up 64 core machines in a day with Nutanix on Azure, versus five months to procure and deploy new on-prem infrastructure in Indonesia.”

NEXT STEPS

Searle and his team are already starting to plan for the next infrastructure refresh, scheduled for 2022. In addition to retiring the company’s few remaining UCS and FlexPod systems, they are planning to expand their Frame deployment to serve more remote users and deploy some of the more advanced Nutanix Frame security options.

“Our goal is to spend as little time and resources as we can on the ‘central plumbing aspects’ of our IT infrastructure so we can free up people for more strategic activities. The Nutanix architecture has helped elevate our role within the company. It has enabled us to serve as a more agile partner in supporting rapidly evolving business demands”, concluded Searle.