Kazakhstan-Based Kaz Minerals Chooses IBM Cloud

IBM Corporation has built a DR site using its cloud infrastructure, to help KAZ Minerals PLC, a copper production company in Kazakhstan, protect and maintain operations – even in case of a disaster.

KAZ Minerals is a growing company focused on large scale, low cost open pit copper mining in the CIS region, and with a record for the delivery of greenfield mining projects. With natural disasters becoming more common and unpredictable, the company needed to update its BC planning, so it turned to IBM to develop a cloud-based DR site for its on-premises data center.

The DR site was built using IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers and VMware Site Recovery Manager with vSphere Replication. The solution is designed to automate the processes of migrating, recovering, testing, re-protecting and failing-back VM workloads and achieve target service level objectives.

The hybrid cloud approach to combining DR site in cloud with the on-premises data center will position KAZ Minerals to restore mission critical business applications, including enterprise resource planning and analytics, in case a disaster affects the data center.

By using IBM public cloud, the Kazakhstan-based company will be able to take advantage of the native redundancy, scalability, availability and flexibility of the cloud platform. In addition, by running its DR system in the cloud, it is able to avoid spending on additional IT infrastructure associated with setting up an on-premises system.

“With our asset base mainly consisting of large scale and low cost copper mines, we need to keep the operating overheads at bay and the IBM’s cloud-based DR solution does exactly that – by eliminating the need for additional Capex while providing a clear price/usage pattern,” said Stanislav Dmitriyev, group IT director, KAZ Minerals.

The cloud-based DR site was set up in 4 months by IBM Services. The required resources are immediately scaled up in case of a disaster, while in the normal data center operation mode, the cloud services costs are kept to a minimum.

“By choosing the hybrid cloud approach, KAZ Minerals has prepared for its business resiliency without making the IT infrastructure redundant and may focus on the primary operations and strategic development,” said Denys Petrov, country GM, IBM in Kazakhstan.

DR site consists of best practices designed to prevent or minimize data loss and business disruption resulting from catastrophic events-everything from equipment failures and localized power outages to cyber-attacks, natural disasters and other disruptive events. Cloud-based backup and DR solutions support both on-premises and cloud-based production environments.

“We see an interest from clients in cloud-based DR solutions to help them thrive in the new reality. Many of our clients have thousands of applications.  Maintaining and securing these in a hybrid cloud environment is critical to their success.  Agility is key, and our cloud resources and virtualization technologies allow IBM to implement complex infrastructure projects in quick timeframes and provide large industrial clients such as KAZ Minerals with DR solutions to address their business requirements and protect their business-critical workloads,” said Nikolay Molchanov, infrastructure services leader, IBM Russia and the CIS.

The two firms signed this transaction in 1Q20.