Qatar Gas Transport (Nakilat) Opts for Veeam Availability Suite Enterprise Plus

Veeam Software, Inc. announced that Qatar Gas Transport Company Limited (Nakilat), a publicly-listed shipping and maritime company, has implemented its Availability Suite Enterprise Plus to provide cloud and data availability and reliability.

The solution ensures that critical data from vessels at sea is reliably and accurately backed up and thanks to Veeam’s instant recovery feature, the customer has managed to reduce restore time for its VMs by 70%. It also solves key cloud challenges and paves the way for the implementation of the company’s cloud-first and IoT strategies.

Nakilat’s Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) shipping fleet is comprised of 69 vessels and is the largest in the world, accounting for about 12% of its shipping capacity. In 2019 alone, it delivered more than 59 million tons of LNG to over 70 terminals in more than 25 countries. Managing 18 vessels, 14 LNG carriers and 4 Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) carriers in-house as well as operating an integrated shipping and maritime operation at its shipyard in Ras Laffan through its local joint venture companies, approximately 3,000 personnel have been employed to run the operation.

Data plays a pivotal role in managing and optimizing the utilization of this expansive fleet. With each vessel fully equipped with sensors and technologies, there was potential for this wealth of data to be utilized to increase operational efficiency, avoid delays, improve planning, enhance security and conduct predictive analysis.

However, there was one big challenge; owing to bandwidth limitation inherent to the VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal) technology used for connectivity on its offshore vessels, Nakilat was unable to reliably backup critical data from its LNG fleet. As these data are critical to empowering C-level executives in their decision making, and in ensuring streamlined operations and BC, this posed a risk to its business.

Nakilat was able to reap benefits soon after deployment of Availability Suite Enterprise Plus solution. Despite VSAT links only offering between 1 to 4 Mb/s transfer speeds, the Veeam’s compression and deduplication capabilities ensure that critical data from vessels at sea are reliably and accurately backed up to the company’s onsite or cloud data centers.

Nakilat has managed to reduce restore time for its VMs by 70% thanks to Veeam’s instant recovery feature and Muhammad Yasir Khan, head of IT infrastructure, Nakilat, states that this has drastically reduced service interruptions. Furthermore, the solution’s on-demand sandboxing restore feature enables the company’s IT team to instantly set up the entire infrastructure in an isolated environment, simplifying testing and development.

Nakilat relies on Veeam to support the company’s ‘cloud-first strategy’. The vendor has enabled Nakilat to meet the point and time recovery objectives of its Office 365 mailboxes and SharePoint online libraries which were previously one of the company’s main cloud challenges.

In all these ambitions, Nakilat remains confident that in they have a technology partner that is prepared to deliver the solutions and support they need.

“We are satisfied with the services provided by Veeam as our partner in enabling constant technological innovation,” he concluded.

Case study