Top performance

How EMC storage helps one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies gain time-to-market advantage in exploration and production. By Mohammed Amin

“The ease of deployment of EMC platforms enables the company to quickly outfit new E&P operating offices while significantly reducing deployment costs”
-Mohammad Amin

In this article I will explain how one of the world’s largest publicly traded oil and gas companies manages risk and uncertainty with EMC Exploration and Production Infrastructure (EPI) and Schlumberger Petrel, an advanced software solution for exploration and production (E&P). Petrel generates enormous volumes of data for the mission-critical work of geophysicists, geologists, engineers, and executive decision makers. Ultimately, tens of billions of dollars of potential revenue ride on well-informed decisions and the process requires an information infrastructure that provides exceptional performance, reliability, and scalability. When Schlumberger introduced Petrel, the customer was uncertain if its legacy non EMC IT infrastructure, running UNIX/Linux-based applications, would be the best choice for Petrel, which is Microsoft Windows-based. A new storage area network (SAN) solution was needed to better suite the advanced earth modeling and reservoir characterisation capabilities of Petrel to achieve performance and platform resiliency, combined with excellent service and support particularly for the remote locations.

The company used a sophisticated procurement system that ranks technology providers across hundreds of criteria, including system architecture, pricing, partnerships, and services to determine the most appropriate solutions for its SAN and NAS requirements. In the SAN arena, EMC demonstrated excellence in the architectural design of the EMC CLARiiON storage system, and in services and key partnerships, particularly with Schlumberger. The customer decided to standardise on the CLARiiON CX series, now deployed in more than 200 loca¬tions worldwide. The customer’s CLARiiON systems support Petrel with nearly one petabyte of storage, which is growing at roughly 300 terabytes each year.

The customer also uses EMC Navisphere Management Suite software to centrally manage, monitor, and configure its CLARiiON SANs from a user-friendly web browser. In addition, the company employs a disaster recovery strategy by using EMC MirrorView software to replicate data to an alternate site where it then performs backups from copies generated by EMC SnapView software. Based on its success with EMC CLARiiON SANs, the company chose to replace its legacy non EMC devices with EMC highly scalable Celerra unified storage systems in NAS environments, which met the company’s multi-protocol requirements, and enabled rapid deployment in isolated exploration sites by E&P operations staff with minimal IT support.

Benefits of the EMC Exploration and Production Infrastructure
The improved performance driven by EMC’s CLARiiON and Celerra systems, key components in the EMC Exploration and Production Infrastructure, played a vital role in optimising the Petrel environment. EMC EPI and Schlumberger Petrel enabled the company’s scientists to generate prospects more quickly by providing faster, more reliable access to critical geophysical and geological data used for earth modelling and reservoir characterisation.

The ease of deployment of EMC platforms enables the company to quickly outfit new E&P operating offices while significantly reducing deployment costs. The modular architecture of these systems also provides the company with a cost-effective, reliable way to rapidly scale in response to sudden changes in storage demands without fear of over- or under-provisioning. The simplicity of managing EMC Information Infrastructure using EMC Navisphere eliminated complexity found in legacy non EMC systems. Navisphere automated storage administration helped the company redeploy almost two-thirds of the associated IT staff to other duties.

Remote staffing and support costs were further reduced by utilising EMC Global Services organisa¬tion to train an in-house team of IT personnel. This allowed the company to be self-sufficient, and speed up problem resolution as company staff were able to communicate more efficiently and effectively with EMC support staff. In the end, the company has been able to successfully leverage EMC’s EPI performance to decrease its time-to-oil, minimise downtime risk associated with data availability, and ultimately reduce costs by eliminating complexity and unnecessary IT staff. As proof of the improvements and benefits obtained, the customer has awarded its ‘Top IT Vendor Award’ to EMC for three years running.

Mohammed Amin is the Regional Manager of EMC Turkey Middle East and North West Africa. Mohammed is based at EMC’s regional headquarters in Dubai. In his seven years of regional management role, Amin developed EMC regional awareness across industries and built a strong team to cater to customer information infrastructure needs and expectations and created a successful customer experience.