ITWire

The mining giant chose the HP solution to deliver the scalability needed to support its expansion and rapidly changing business needs, with projections that it will triple its production of iron ore to 155 million tons per year (mtpa) by the end of June next year.

Fortescue’s Chief Information Officer, Vito Forte, said the company’s legacy IT infrastructure lacked the flexibility to support growth, while administrative requirements were preventing IT staff from proactively responding to business needs.

“Our existing IT infrastructure could not keep up with the rate of growth we were experiencing and stifled the ability of our IT staff to provide innovative value to the business.

“We were able to quickly implement HP CloudSystem Matrix, creating an agile infrastructure easily maintained and managed remotely by HP. This allows our IT staff to focus on the needs of our employees and customers, as well as to drive innovation,” Forte said.

Fortescue has upgraded its data centre with HP Converged Infrastructure solutions, including HP CloudSystem Matrix and HP Performance-Optimised Data Centres (PODs) to create a flexible, open cloud environment with scalability and simple management to support growth.

The HP CloudSystem Matrix solution has been deployed in Fortescue’s main data centre in Perth, and two HP PODs are located at the organisation’s mining and port locations, 2,500 kilometres from the main data centre, ensuring smooth, resilient operations even in the event of a communications failure or downtime at the main data centre in Perth.

Raymond Maisano, country manager, Industry Standard Servers and Software, Enterprise Group, HP South Pacific, said Fortescue had chosen HP Technology Services Critical Watch Centre (CWC), based in Newcastle in NSW for remote management, “allowing the organisation’s IT staff to focus on technology innovation rather than daily administrative duties, while saving costs.”  

Maisano said that Fortescue had also worked with HP’s leasing and life-cycle asset management services division, HP Financial Services, to eliminate equipment overhead by leveraging a utility-based finance model, paying only for the equipment it uses. “This provides Fortescue with the flexibility and speed to support future expansion while conserving capital and optimising cash flow.”

“Mining organisations are going through a period of extraordinary growth due to high customer demand, which means more pressure is being placed on IT to deliver applications and services quickly. The combination of HP’s Converged Infrastructure technology and managed services ensures that Fortescue can respond to its rapidly changing business needs in a timely and predictable manner.”

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