Edge attracts oil and gas industry

Both sectors have a unique set of requirements for right-sized, simple-to-operate, enterprise-class IT solutions that can be deployed quickly and managed remotely. CKenergy Electric Cooperative, Echo Energy and Telford Offshore all faced challenges including a need to update their legacy IT systems, reduce IT system management time, simplify their IT environments and strengthen their disaster recovery protocols in each of their satellite locations. 

 

The IT team at Echo Energy, a London-based gas exploration and mining company with assets in Latin America, was spending a great deal of time managing its legacy IT system—a system that needed updating to scale with anticipated growth and expansion. Using Scale Computing HC3, the company was able to migrate its mission-critical applications from a single server with iSCSI storage to a set of individual virtual application servers, specifically configured for each department—with each server benefitting from cross-departmental shared storage and enhanced backup and recovery options.  

 

Chris Selby, IT director, Echo Energy explained: “Thanks to Scale Computing HC3 self-healing technology, easy-to-configure snapshot replication, and high availability functionality, we have decreased the time spent recovering from a hardware failure running a critical workload by about 97 percent.”

 

Oklahoma-based CKenergy Electric Cooperative provides reliable, sustainable and affordable energy at a local and community level. The company’s three-person IT team turned to Scale Computing when their legacy hypervisor license was due for renewal, and the IT infrastructure needed updating. Scale Computing HC3 provided a cost-effective way to maintain high IT system availability. It also delivered a simple, straightforward way to manage the company’s virtual computing environment, reducing the time IT staff spend on managing infrastructure by as much as 49 percent.

 

Justin Miles, IT systems analyst, CKenergy Electric Cooperative, comments: “Scale Computing HC3 platform has made management and configuration of our VMs vastly more efficient. The web browser, in particular, is just what we needed and has dramatically increased the speed with which we can create new VM instances.”

 

Telford Offshore, a Dubai-based company that provides large-scale seafaring vessels to support the offshore oil and gas extraction industry, had inherited a cumbersome and difficult-to-manage IT infrastructure following a series of acquisitions. It became apparent that the IT system had to be rationalised to serve the business better and keep the company agile and responsive to customer needs. The new solution would also have to be simple to operate, and ideally have a remote management capability so that mission-critical systems could be maintained, even when out at sea for extended periods. 

 

Wouter Lustig, IT manager at Telford Offshore explains, “Scale Computing HC3 was a natural fit. The solution was designed with simplicity, scalability, and availability at its core, and these three aspects matched the business' requirements perfectly. It pairs greatly with our added services and complements our expertise in managing a hyperconverged infrastructure. The HC3 also met our requirement for remote management functionality—allowing us to service and maintain the infrastructure even when our vessels are in the middle of an ocean.”

 

Jeff Ready, CEO and co-founder, Scale Computing, concludes: “Unlike legacy solutions, Scale Computing takes advantage of the efficient, hypervisor-embedded HC3 platform to free up RAM and CPU for running workloads. This dramatically lowers the hardware and software footprint needed to provide high availability to edge workloads, and makes it the ideal choice for the oil and gas sector and the energy production industry.”