Exploration and production infrastructure

Today, oil and gas companies in the upstream segment are utilising more sophisticated, higher resolution seismic acquisition, processing, analysis and modelling techniques. The combination of the growth from 2D to 3D to 4D seismic surveys, pre-stack analysis and advanced modelling has driven a 500-fold increase in data.

“Technological advances are helping companies accelerate discovery, optimise production and minimise the risk of unsuccessful drilling efforts due to incomplete or inaccurate information.”
-Mohammed Amin

The industry is benefiting from more powerful computational capacity, allowing data to be concurrently analysed. This creates storage challenges. Joint ventures and M&A activity lead to not only broader collaboration on data sets, but to increased redundancy and data management complexities. Upstream operations are also constantly adding more and more specialised exploration applications and complex collection and analysis methods like real-time seismic-while-drilling (SWD).

These technological advances are helping companies accelerate discovery, optimise production and minimise the risk of unsuccessful drilling efforts due to incomplete or inaccurate information. Companies though need an IT infrastructure aligned with their business challenges.

It is important for organisations to have in place the right exploration and production infrastructure (EPI) framework that is designed to address unique, data intensive challenges with industry leading benefits.

What are the most important components in an EPI solution?

The first is high-performance unified storage with upstream application accelerator that can offer dramatic performance improvements over traditional NAS, to accelerate discovery efforts, decrease geoscientist query times and reduce information management by minimising the fragmentation of data sets. Organisations should look for technology solutions to decrease the cost of operations such as fully automated storage tiering (FAST), deduplication, compression and backup to disk for faster recovery.

Backup with deduplication and compression is also important, and companies should look for backup solutions that have the capabilities of providing seismic interpretation and analysis applications with space-saving and energy-efficient data protection. This option will eliminate data inefficiencies and reduce the cost of operations.

Next, look at efficient data archiving. The solution should enable organisations to free expensive primary storage of inactive files. It can offer additional benefits such as options for online access to files for pre-stack analysis or more data accessibility online. Such options help organisations alleviate the cost and management burdens of explosive E&P data growth.

Consider a file system assessment or data storage profiling service. This service should provide intelligent analysis to define data and information strategies with confidence to reduce administration costs, improve application performance and improve backup and recovery times.

In addition, include disaster recovery capabilities. This will enable organisations to protect their most valuable data assets, mitigate downtime risk and help improve service level agreements, recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO).

Finally, data protection and intellectual property is a critical component in today's increasingly mobile environment and given rising cyber threats. It has become crucial for organisations to implement data security solutions that can provide authentication for assuring identities to a system, resource, information or a transaction based on risk; data loss prevention and discovery, monitoring and protection of sensitive data from loss or misuse, whether in a data centre, on the network or out at the endpoints; compliance with security information and event management (SIEM) to transform raw log data into critical information to meet your compliance, security and IT and network goals; fraud prevention and protection against identity theft and other external threats targeting customers, regardless of the channel they choose to conduct their business; and integration of information management and storage technologies with physical security and video surveillance network devices to provide enterprise-class protection for your facilities, personnel and physical assets.

While organisations should be considering all those benefits for their IT environment today, some oil and gas organisations are planning for the future already and riding the next big IT wave. Organisations are embarking on the journey to the private cloud in order to improve business agility, reduce IT complexity and manage the explosion of digital data. The private cloud creates a fully virtualised, next-generation IT infrastructure that spans internal and external resources. It presents seamless services to the business with IT fully in control, combining the best of the data centre with the best of the cloud.

About

Mohammed Amin is VP and General Manager of EMC Turkey, Emerging Africa and Middle East Region. Based in EMC's regional headquarters in Dubai, he has overseen the opening of nine EMC offices in the region. A vital element of his responsibilities is to increase regional awareness and demand for EMC's comprehensive information infrastructure technologies with its vast portfolio.