Customer: Maran Tankers Management
Country: Greece
Industry: Shipping
Organization Size: Large
Products & Services: Citrix, Remote Desktop Services, Hyper-V, System Center
Customer Profile
Maran Tankers Management (“MTM”) is the Oil Tanker Shipping unit of the Angelicoussis Shipping Group Limited (“ASGL“). ASGL’s fleet comprises of bulk carriers, tankers, LNG vessels and LPG vessels. Today it employs a staff of approximately 300 shore side professionals as well as over 3,700 officers and crew.
Situation
Maran’s infrastructure was consisted of an heterogenous environment of different Windows server versions which could not allow a highly redundant environment. In addition, remote users needed and couldn’t use company’s resources and apps and on board servers would need to operate on a redundant environment.
The company needed:
- a high availability solution that would ensure maximum up time
- remote users to work with apps hosted on company servers
- high availability on board
Solution
Office Line SA designed and implemented 3 different solutions:
- a highly virtualized environment
- installed Windows Remote Desktop Services along with Citrix XenDekstop V7
- and a highly available setup was implemented on every ship
The virtualized implementation was done using Microsoft’s Hyper-V Server 2012 on a redundant 4 HP Server environment. The installation of System Center Operations Manager and System Center Virtual Machine Manager which are part of Microsoft’s System Center Suite provided monitoring of all systems on both hardware and software levels.
The need of the users to run corporate applications and use network resources led Office Line’s team to proceed with an exceptional solution called Windows Remote Desktop Services. That way not only remote users became more efficient but also on board staff were now able to be both effective and in many occasions, proactive. We have also installed Citric XenDesktop Software for pilot purposes.
The need of a redundant and highly available Server system on the ships gave us no other choice but to setup a virtualized environment based on Hyper-V Replica topology using Windows Server 2012 R2. The system on every ship was configured that way in order to achieve the lowest RPO/RTO as was specifically required by the client. Server roles like Active directory, Remote Desktop Services and Database Services were installed as part of a complete high availability system.
Benefits
The client will enjoy a full redundant and highly available server setup that will maximize productivity hence stay ahead of competition.
Other
- User efficiency via Remote Desktop Services
- Highly available server systems on every ship
- High availability of critical services
- Users can now work any app hosted on company’s servers from anywhere