ACADEMIA

Addressing the increasing demand for supercomputing power in the oil and gas industry, California-based Appro has partnered with Houston-based CyrusOne to host high-performance services at the latter’s flagship Tier 4 data center. Located in the energy capital of Houston, oil and gas companies can easily access the data center for additional capacity and services to meet their short-term computational requirements, planned or unplanned workloads, new projects and new business opportunities. This data center is one of the few top-tier centers engineered specifically for dense power and cooling requirements needed for Grid computing. Unique outsourcing integrated solution An experienced provider of high-performance enterprise computing systems, Appro is headquartered in Milpitas, Calif., with a research and development as well as manufacturing center in Asia and a sales/service office in Houston. Providing remote monitoring, data center operations and managed information technology (IT) services, CyrusOne is a leader in IT infrastructure outsourcing. The synergy between the two companies focusing on the oil and gas industry led to a joint solution to help companies optimize returns on technology investment while ensuring application availability, data security and superior network performance. “Appro’s Computing on Demand service is not limited to the oil and gas industry, but is also available to other industries that are in need of supercomputing power,” said Daniel Kim, chief executive officer of Appro. “This service is a prime example of Appro’s increased focus on IT services and solutions. Computing on Demand unites Appro’s strengths in servers and storage cluster solutions with our design architecture, management and support capabilities. Computing on Demand provides greater flexibility to our customers to tap into high-performance computing resources when and where they need them at a predictable price.” Additionally, Appro’s flexible, reliable and scalable outsourcing integrated solution can be tailored to best meet an oil and gas company’s requirements. Companies can contract by paying only for the amount of capacity reserves for the duration of the contract period and deploy fast, scalable capacity to support business needs with minimum financial and technical risk. Appro’s hosting these services at CyrusOne’s facility not only provides data center operations and management, but also offers and additional layer of security and availability. Specifically, Compute on Demand leverages economies of scale and enables seismic data processing much more cost-effectively. As to why oil and gas companies would choose Compute on Demand instead of using in-house capabilities, the answer is “comprehensive outsourcing solution.” The significant power and cooling required for supercomputing in the oil and gas industry goes well beyond the capabilities of virtually any other data center. In contrast, Appro’s comprehensive outsourced solution incorporates the hardware, system software, associated licensing costs and implementation into one bundled solution. Typically that also translates into a more cost-effective solution implemented more quickly than a company’s internal approach. Also factor in the previously noted reliability and scalability where more companies are readily seeing the competitive advantages. In the highly proprietary oil and gas industry, one question generally reverberates fro industry companies: “Will our data be secure?” In short, the answer is “yes.” Appro offers secure IT infrastructure, technology-savvy engineers with a high-quality professional services team while CyrusOne’s Tier 4 status is the highest rating by the Uptime Institute. Appro’s Compute on Demand offers server clusters with AMD Opteron processor 32/64-bit technology or Intel Nacona processor 32/64-bit technology with single- or dual-core processors, management and storage nodes, high-speed interconnect options, VPN gateway devices, firewalls, Linux or Windows that can be fully customized for any oilfield company’s needs. Those capabilities are in addition to CyrusOne’s facility itself because many companies are as concerned about extreme weather conditions as about technological “cracks.” Serving as a disaster recovery site for many of Houston’s leading oil and gas companies, CyrusOne left no issue unresolved from the outset – specifically, a hurricane- resistant roof, thick walls and slab, and raised floors throughout. The facility is one of the highest in the city (65ft – 20m – above sea level), and it’s outside the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s 500-year flood plain. With a mission to be the leading provider of managed hosting infrastructure services to the energy sector, CyrusOne’s customer base is 40% energy with 75% to 80% hosting production environments at CyrusOne. Services are in place for oil and gas in general, SCADA, rig applications and seismic, and four account reps are exclusively dedicated to energy.