Getting to grips with the IT environment

An Industry Insight feature with EMC

The oil and gas companies gather and manage tremendous amounts of critical data and information every second of every day. EMC’s Mohammed Amin discusses the key issues and outlines how optimising the IT environment can drive efficiency to your business.

Information is estimated to be growing at about 55 percent yearly. To handle this massive influx, organisations are continuously investing in IT resources, both capital as well as human; the net result is that organisations are struggling to keep up with IT requirements from the business. This forces them to implement tactical strategies rather than building and maintaining broader, visionary strategies for their data centres. The ‘block and tackle’ approach is leading to large-scale inefficiencies across data centres, resulting in financial loss for businesses.

The widening gap between physical and operational assets of a data centre and the lack of their optimal use are resulting in higher costs for everything including hardware acquisition and maintenance, energy consumptions, data centre real estate, infrastructure management, lost revenues and human resources.

Today, oil and gas companies are facing many challenges, including:

• Exponential data growth and terabyte-sized project data sets are placing intense pressure on the petrotechnical computing environment and forcing companies to take a new look at how they manage and protect growing volumes of data.
• High costs as reservoir, ERP, and CRM data is unused for periods of time. The expense of managing historical volumes continues to increase.
• Aligning business needs and technology expenditures to ensure the appropriate level of performance, protection, and availability to support business unit application requirements.
• Compliance with various regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley.
• Protecting data from planned and unplanned outages, and accidental or malicious deletion.
• In today’s world of mature basins and smaller reservoirs, the need to operate in a highly cost-efficient manner is paramount to continued success and profitability. Data quality and availability are essential to reducing exploration, development and production costs.

So how do energy organisations need to act to overcome those challenges? Information lifecycle management (ILM) is a strategy for aligning your IT infrastructure with the needs of your business based on information’s changing value. Through ILM, you get the most value from your information, at the lowest TCO, at every point of its lifecycle. To successfully implement your ILM strategy, EMC offers a variety of solutions as part of tiered storage architecture for the oil and gas enterprise.

Maximizing the value of your data

Seismic data is being captured and changing in value over time. EMC’s ILM offerings deliver solutions for seismic file storage and management of every point along the data lifecycle, until eventual archival and/or disposal. EMC has the breadth and depth of solutions to add value across the entire value chain in oil and gas environments. From upstream to downstream, EMC manages the lifecycle of your data, regardless of the project, initiative, or business process and supports all your data management including:

• Enterprise business applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), databases and email.
• Enterprise content management for compliance, archiving and retrieval, and digital asset management.
• Business continuity and security for tiered storage replication, back and recovery, server cluster replication and virtualization, and information security.
• Consolidation of applications, servers and storage.

EMC is able to combine hardware, software and services with industry leading application vendors to produce solutions for oil and gas customers bringing immediate and lasting value to the bottom line. In today’s economy and with the credit crunch challenges, organisations need to build an efficient information infrastructure, they need to take a holistic view of their information infrastructure operations including people and process. Organisations need a staff with business process and technical expertise. Definition, creation, implementation of operational processes in IT projects are fundamental for IT efficiency. Awareness, understanding, and effort in optimising all aspects of data center are required in building fully functional efficient information infrastructure this includes facilities, support infrastructure such as electricity and cooling equipment, and IT infrastructure including applications, servers, networks and storage.

Mohammed Amin is the Regional Manager of EMC Middle East and North West Africa, a position he has held since November 2002. He is based at EMC’s regional headquarters in Dubai Internet City. During this time, Amin’s managed to develop regional awareness and demand for EMC’s comprehensive information infrastructure solutions and increase EMC’s regional customer base.