More than ever, oil and gas industry leaders are expected to rapidly analyze large amounts of geological data to quickly make decisions that optimize resources, get to market faster, and realize revenue opportunities that improve financial performance. It is a mouthful, but it is no exaggeration. To achieve that end, they are looking to emerging technology solutions to deliver quality data in shorter timeframes.

Global datacenter provider CyrusOne has allied itself with Dell and R Systems. The hardware and managed services duo looked to CyrusOne’s Houston West facility to enable the first-ever oil and gas enterprise high-performance computing (HPC) solution.

Leveraging dedicated, secure, and powerful computing resources for periods between one day and one year, the enterprise HPC cloud solution from Dell and R Systems enables companies to align performance compute directly to project periods and technology refresh cycles. Aligning in this way optimizes resources while still allowing companies to take advantage of the fastest compute technology available to analyze data. Some customers hop on and get their work done on a project-by-project basis, while others choose to transition all of their data off site to the cloud solution.

The days of delivering reporting from the field via snail mail for corporate analysts to then take a few more days to analyze are gone. Responding to the marketplace today does not afford business leaders the luxury of that model. The HPC cloud solution expedites that process to enable real-time decision-making. These real-time decisions enabled by the HPC cloud solution have the benefit of taking into account reams of data.

The burgeoning amount of data in the oil and gas industry shows no signs of slowing. Compared to 50 years ago, not only is the volume of data for a specific site greater, but the number of sites simultaneously under exploration has multiplied. There also are source variations including shale, deep water, and oil sands. Datasets and modeling and simulation requirements are exploding as the industry works to analyze and categorize information captured via thousands of sensors in a short period of time for delivery to the right decision-maker.

Whether it is a team on a platform in the ocean, at the shale and oil sand sites, or in the corporate office, this solution allows for huge amounts of data to be collected and sent to the right person to do the right job.

The enterprise HPC cloud solution frees companies from having to manage HPC environments and resources so they can focus on running their businesses, not datacenters. It is an alternative to legacy IT infrastructures because cloud solutions are faster to deploy, easily scale to uses and business cycles, and require less capital and operating investment. It is a strong alternative to investing in traditional hardware and processing equipment for those businesses that need immediate, high-performing computing solutions for shorter time-frames. In addition to the new oil and gas industry offering, the HPC cloud solution can support any industry requiring complex computing, including finance, healthcare and life sciences, manufacturing, and media.

Reliable solution

To mitigate any performance risks, Dell and R Systems chose to launch the cloud-based solution in CyrusOne’s Houston West enterprise datacenter. A 14,864-sq-m (160,000-sq-ft) colocation facility, it is the industry’s largest digital energy campus and a geophysical center for seismic exploration computing. It is optimized for high-value seismic processing for oil and gas customers with datacenter power systems and redundant cooling architectures. It uses advanced components and is designed with 2N parallel redundancies, which provide customers with 100% uptime service level agreements.

Since CyrusOne has supported traditional hardware and processing for the data-intensive oil and gas industry for more than a decade, it was a natural progression for the company to align with Dell, R Systems, and their oil and gas industry customers using the HPC cloud. In addition to space, power, and cooling assurances, CyrusOne offers the ability to transfer data between equipment within a single location and across multiple geographic locations via its The Sky for the Cloud peering and interconnection platform.

This platform creates an ecosystem to efficiently facilitate the generation, analysis, and sharing of all geophysical data locally and statewide across a Brocade Ethernet platform and Infinera DTN optical platform. Cloud solutions are housed in a customized data hall designed for maximizing power usage effectiveness. Peering and interconnection within a single location and externally to multiple interconnected facilities more quickly and affordably pulls content from the edge of the Internet to the heart of the datacenter.

In December 2012 the company began piloting the first statewide Internet exchange in the country that will connect all CyrusOne facilities in Texas – including in Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. The platform provides customers with freedom of choice about how to build out capacity choosing either CyrusOne’s bandwidth marketplace, an Internet exchange platform, or a cross-connect to cloud services. The Internet exchange is expected to officially launch in 1Q 2013.