Bringing a critical metal to global markets

As the world’s leading supplier of niobium, CBMM is making the most of rising demand for the strategically important metal. Through advanced metallurgical processes, niobium-enhanced products deliver superior performance across various industries, from automotive and construction to aerospace and electronics. About 90% of the world’s niobium is currently used in steel production, increasing steel’s yield strength by over 30% while improving toughness and corrosion resistance. But new markets are emerging, as niobium becomes important for a variety of other applications, including next-generation lithium-ion battery technology, where it can enable ultra-fast charging and exceptionally long battery lifespans.

CBMM is doing everything it can to prepare for continued growth. The company kicked off its Project Phoenix to update end-of-life equipment, address cost and complexity challenges, and establish a new data center that consolidates IT and operational technology (OT) near its main niobium mine in Araxá, Brazil. “To support CBMM’s evolution, we had to transform our operations to deliver greater digital innovation and increase sustainability,” says Rodrigo Fernandes, IT infrastructure leader at CBMM. “We needed infrastructure that would give us greater agility, increase security, and enable more scalable operations.”

A single platform for IT and OT

CBMM operates separate yet interconnected IT and OT environments, each supporting critical business functions. Project Phoenix aimed to grapple with hardware challenges in both areas.

CBMM’s IT systems primarily deliver custom applications used by the company’s internal departments, including human resources and finance. The existing architecture consisted of a FlashStack that combined Pure Storage FlashArray hardware with Cisco UCS B-Series blades and Cisco networking. The older UCS M5 blades in use were no longer keeping up with company needs.

The OT platform posed a more significant challenge. The OT environment supports CBMM's core mining and industrial operations, hosting industrial equipment management platforms, SCADA systems, and a variety of other industrial applications. 

Because these systems are responsible for managing mining processes and controlling industrial machines, high availability and reliability are essential to ensure continuous operations and prevent mining disruptions. But CBMM’s hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform running VMware vSphere and vSAN had reached end of life after just three years of operation—an unacceptably short lifecycle. 

Beyond these hardware issues, managing this multi-vendor environment resulted in increased operational challenges and higher support costs. A key objective of Project Phoenix: standardize on a single vendor and technology for both IT and OT.

With the help of Cisco partner, HYPE Solutions, CBMM identified Cisco UCS X-Series as the only solution capable of supporting both environments. To update its IT infrastructure, the team settled on the latest X-Series M7 servers with 100G connectivity between chassis and fabric interconnects. For the OT environment, they chose Cisco Compute Hyperconverged with Nutanix deployed on Cisco UCS X-Series Direct, a self-contained system that integrates fabric interconnects into the chassis. 

CBMM was the first company worldwide to deploy Nutanix on UCS X-Series. Based on its experience with UCS, the company expects substantially greater longevity from its new X-Series servers than it saw from the previous HCI hardware.

Several of CBMM’s industrial software and equipment vendors recommended Nutanix, and—by moving the OT environment from VMware to Nutanix and the Nutanix AHV hypervisor—CBMM mitigated the uncertainty around future increases in VMware licensing costs. The fact that Nutanix and Cisco have a proven partnership with strong support also contributed to the company’s decision.

The initiative also addressed connectivity issues impacting mining operations by relocating both IT and OT from Sao Paulo to new facilities in Araxá. Once the equipment was moved, migrating the FlashStack environment was simply a matter of moving VMs from the old UCS hardware to the new hardware. The migration of the old HCI environment was accomplished using Nutanix Move to transfer VMs from VMware to AHV with minimal disruption.

For reliability, both the IT and OT environments use synchronous replication to duplicate all data between two data centers that are several kilometers apart. Pure Storage ActiveCluster, which CBMM has used for several years, provides replication for IT systems. Nutanix MetroCluster is used for replication on the OT side—the first deployment of MetroCluster on Nutanix AHV.

Dramatic operational and business improvements

CBMM has gained significant benefits from the new deployment. With Cisco, CBMM has standardized on a single vendor—and a single server technology—across its IT and OT environments. The IT environment continues to run on VMware, while OT runs on Nutanix AHV. Several X-Series blades were also deployed running Microsoft Hyper-V to support Active Directory and Microsoft applications. With X-Series everywhere, CBMM can potentially repurpose nodes between environments if needed.

Cisco Intersight greatly simplifies management, allowing the CBMM team to see and manage everything across IT and OT in one place. CBMM is already seeing reduced support costs and increased service availability, and end-users have noticed a performance improvement, with processes being noticeably faster. The number of end-user calls for support has also been reduced.

This transition resulted in a dramatic reduction in data center footprint, with IT consolidating from about 18 servers to six, and OT also consolidating 12 servers down to six. This consolidation not only dramatically reduces IT complexity, including simplifying cabling, it has helped CBMM reduce its carbon footprint significantly and meet sustainability goals. 

Cisco’s two-decade relationship with CBMM is a key element in the company’s past—and future—success. “Cisco is a strategic partner for us,” says Fernandes. “With X-Series and Intersight, Cisco has integrated our IT and OT environments, and now everything is supported by a single vendor that offers excellent support, making our jobs a lot simpler.”

In addition to its strong relationship with Cisco, CBMM also relies on HYPE Solutions. “HYPE has been an excellent partner for us,” says Fernandes. “They helped us plan the whole transition and helped deploy the new hardware and migrate our applications.”

Preparing for a bright future

Looking ahead, CBMM plans to update existing Nexus 7000 switches to Nexus 9000 and implement Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) on Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches to enhance network security with micro-segmentation and zero trust. The company is also exploring additional Cisco security products, and it continues to invest in IoT and automation initiatives to support its mining operations. These advancements will be critical as the niobium market continues to grow. Fernandes concludes, “The success of the infrastructure transformation that Cisco has enabled positions CBMM to maintain our leadership position in niobium technology to address the needs of global industry.”