Northern Marine Modernizes Critical Fleet IT Systems With Scale Computing HyperCore

Deploy a reliable and ultra-resilient onboard IT infrastructure

The Northern Marine Group is a wholly owned subsidiary of Stena AB, one of the largest family-owned group of companies in Sweden. Northern Marine Group has grown from a ship management provider to a group of companies offering the full spectrum of marine and offshore services. Headquartered in Glasgow, their diverse fleet of technically managed vessels includes a wide range of tankers, ferries and offshore assets.

Keeping a fleet of ships up and running 24x7x365 is no small task. A modern onboard IT-infrastructure bridges two worlds: traditional onboard IT and the cloud. However, even in today’s always connected digital economy, there’s no guarantee that a connection with the cloud or even on shore is always available. While shore-based connections dramatically improved over the past two decades, continuous operation and regulated safety requirements drives the need of an onboard data center approach. Again, connection cannot always be guaranteed. Many ship operators have dealt with communications problems in the middle of a storm, during a satellite switch, during a cyber-attack or worse, communication might be jammed during a hijack attempt.

Due to regulatory requirements, each vessel contains a triple management system to ensure proper shipboard and safety management. Essentially it is a document management system to house the manuals, safety procedures, policies, etc. for the ship and are updated on a continuous basis. If at any time this document management system is unavailable, it can result in compliance violations, ultimately limiting the number of charters for each vessel. Each vessel also contains a plan maintenance system and communication systems that must be always functioning to comply with regulatory requirements.

On-ship applications include:

• Accounting & Cargo Management
• Crew Management
• Planned Maintenance System (PMS)
• Crew Training & Simulation
• Firewall / Security
• Data Collection & Analytics
• File/Print

Over time, it became clear to Northern Marine that they needed to:

• Embrace newer technology to deliver improved fleet management application performance, availability, and capacity
• Monitoring
• Guaranteed operational productivity
• Lower TCO
• To best ensure keeping its critical, regulatory data safe

A global fleet demands a flexible approach at the network edge

Northern Marine’s fleet can be found anywhere in the world and is constantly on the move. The realities of a truly global environment mean that a vessel’s IT infrastructure must be reliable and easy to manage. To replace or repair any part of the operating environment onboard a ship is very complex and can take days to fix, depending on where a ship might be. Optimizing operations with self-healing, automated infrastructure for all applications was a crucial next step. Because internet connectivity is highly intermittent with no IT personnel onboard, Northern Marine deployed SC//HyperCore clusters to run their operations smoothly while at sea. The first 27 ships were deployed in 2019 and 2020.

During 2019 and 2020, Northern Marine achieved consistent application availability, simplified management, and secure applications across the initial 27 ships where HyperCore Edge was deployed. They were able to free their operations team from the complexity and costs of traditional IT, giving them peace of mind and allowing them to focus their attention on core business needs.

By consolidating the three separate systems that manage storage, compute, and network into a single, highly available hyperconverged system, HyperCore Edge provides integrated server virtualization, disaster recovery tools and management capabilities into an easy-to-manage system that can remain operational in even the most extreme and demanding environments. Based on the success of the initial deployment, Northern Marine deployed another 17 ships in 2021. The last deployment was based on the new nano-size edge cluster with HE100 servers.

Each HyperCore Edge node only requires two connections, a round DC power plug and a rectangular Ethernet plug, allowing anyone who could plug in a laptop to add or swap a failed node.

Easy to deploy, simple to manage, and cost-effective

Northern Marine immediately noticed enhanced performance and simplified management as soon as the solution was deployed. With the Scale Computing rollout, Northern Marine was able to build a single virtualized server, export it and send it to all of the vessels, saving around four hours per build. Other immediate benefits included:

• Simplified and reduced management time
• Complete redundancy – always on 24/7
• Business continuity
• Snapshot replication and backup
• Ready for future deployments at sea
• 90% less time to rebuild: Restoring a system/VM on a vessel, for example after a cyber-attack, takes a fraction of the time, with less hours and stress for crew and shore-based support staff
• 90% less time to install a Docker application: Installing a new Docker application takes a fraction of the time compared to the same installation on the old Hyper-V environment

While the team hasn’t had an opportunity to conduct a full ROI analysis at this point, Northern Marine is looking forward to deploying more HyperCore Edge clusters in the future.