Case Study Requirement of Reliable and Robust Backup for Oil and Gas Industry
StoneFly is the innovator of worldwide storage standard protocol
StoneFly Inc. 26250 Eden Landing Hayward, California, USA
Oil and Gas industry is becoming more aware of the advantages of digital transformation and is gradually adopting it as the key driver of the business value. With the growth and development of data centers, Data availability became a critical issue for businesses and governments as they rely on data availability for competitive advantage and risk management/avoidance. O&G operations throughout the value chain carry environmental risks that are existential to the organization, and compliance officers are increasingly dependent on loss avoidance and data reliability. Information management is becoming a daunting task as the data generation and storage are exploding. New applications are processing data from virtualized storage environments as well as public and private clouds. Data centers are located far from users working in remote environments, and mergers are bringing together disparate storage and VM environments. Today’s user is completely intolerant to outages; and IT must modernize its approach to Replication, backup and restoration. Old school backup tools are failing to prevent major outages and data loss as they place high demands on the data administrator which in turn are not able to cope with ever increasing data. As the tradition tools become obsolete, IT needs an advanced and versatile solution that delivers extreme availability, simple replication and restoration and high visibility into diversified virtual environments.
1
Technology is the ultimate answer to risk mitigation throughout the oil and gas industry. Companies are rapidly adopting new applications and processing more data to enhance performance. This ever-increasing data throughput in High-stakes environments demands total reliability of IT services. There is no tolerance for downtime in Oil and Gas industry as a single environmental mishap can cripple an O&G producer. CIOs are looking to move beyond legacy backup tools and deploy agile solutions that deliver unprecedented availability of data and applications while easing the strains on the IT.
Energy Industry Leverages Data for Business Value O&G companies have increased their reliance on complex, data-intensive applications to support business and mission critical operations. From exploration and production (E&P), through pipeline operations and downstream delivery, the growing use of big data, machine data, and analytics applications is causing a data explosion. Companies rely on server virtualization, modern storage applications, and cloud-based services to support high-risk operations. To accomplish this, IT is modernizing data centers as well as expanding data storage and leveraging cloud repositories. Zero tolerance for downtime is understandable given the consequences of accidents and outages. Accident avoidance is the highest priority in O&G industry — the
2
consequences of mishaps in production, pipeline, and storage operations are potentially ruinous. Disasters such as the BP Deepwater Horizon spill and the Aliso Canyon gas storage facility leak demonstrate the potential hfor harm to the public and the corporation. McKinsey management consulting firm reports that health, safety, and environmental (HSE) incidents can threaten not only profitability but also the very existence of an operator. Downtime caused on drilling rigs and pipelines is not only an existential threat, but the financial losses caused by work stoppages can be severe. System monitoring applications report conditions based on data from machine sensors, drones, and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), and operators cannot tolerate any downtime that could interrupt operations or blind them to dangerous conditions. Every sector of the O&G industry is increasingly dependent on big data and powerful applications as geoscientists pursue remote resources in deep water and jungle environments and deploy horizontal drilling to extract resources previously considered unrecoverable. Seismic exploration applications create real-time views that merge live data with data from virtualized servers and cloud based repositories. Successful evaluation of hydrocarbon resource areas is essential for cost effective production. The demand is intense for data that is current, complete, and highly available.
3
Once a resource area is targeted, the production team begins the capital intensive process of drilling and operating wells. In the shale formations that produce a growing share of the world’s oil and gas supplies, drilling operations prepare the formation for hydraulic fracturing, which releases the hydrocarbon resources from the shale to enable efficient extraction. Drillers and frackers rely on digital oil field applications to hit targets with precision and leverage feedback from machine sensors to minimize well downtime and increase production. Data from thousands of machine sensors on the rig and drilling equipment populates big data well optimization applications, and predictive shutdown systems use machine sensors to detect faulty equipment and prevent catastrophic events. Further downstream, energy suppliers deliver petroleum products to thousands of wholesale and retail sites via operational gas and liquid pipelines, rail networks, and fleets. Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems leverage machine data to predict maintenance needs, and tank monitors deliver real-time data on customer supplies and usage rates, enabling suppliers to satisfy every endpoint efficiently.
Gradual increase in Data Dependence O&G companies are embracing digital transformation not only for greater operational efficiency, but also for
4
competitive advantage. Cost pressures and increased competition are forcing IT to do more with less. At the same time, organizations demand higher performance to support agile decision making and collaboration. Given persistent downward pressure on petroleum commodity prices, E&P operators are virtualizing 2-D and 3-D applications for seismic analysis to gain greater certainty about subterranean reservoirs before committing to production. IDC predicts that by 2019, 25% of O&G companies will leverage modeling, simulation, and 3-D virtual reality to optimize asset portfolio performance and reduce risk. Hydrocarbon reservoir modeling often relies on live data from locations such as ships at sea, exploration sites in jungles, or remote oil fields. Massive data sets move in and out of the cloud and between data centers and work sites that can be a continent away. Downstream energy suppliers are digitizing operations to predict pipeline maintenance needs and reduce cost and risk. Wholesale petroleum suppliers are gaining visibility into customer sites via tank monitors and geo-fencing. Customer data informs logistics applications that help suppliers improve service and reliability and increase delivery efficiency. Innovation across the O&G enterprise leaves IT managing
5
heterogeneous environments that grow more complex each year. Not only is data storage growing but cloud storage is increasing and mergers are bringing new infrastructures into the mix. Organizations are becoming more dependent on advanced data center technologies and cloud storage, while workloads are growing increasingly mission-critical. Legacy backup tools cannot keep up. Backup testing is inadequate, and patches and application upgrades cause unacceptable downtime. Further, there is limited visibility to spot trouble before applications are affected.
Enabling the On Going Energy Company As O&G organizations embrace digital solutions to support operations, massive data sets must be stored, replicated, and kept available 24/7/365. In addition, servers must support applications and large volumes of virtualized data with constant availability. “Speed of recovery is the key to availability, and successful businesses ensure that they can recover in minutes, not hours,” IDC wrote in a 2016 executive brief. IT needs an availability solution that supports diverse environments with data loss avoidance, high-speed recovery, and complete visibility. Legacy backup systems simply cannot deliver the recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs)
6
that an on going energy company requires. IT decision makers must eliminate the “availability gap” between what users demand and what IT delivers. An effective availability solution should also provide insight into the backup infrastructure and alert IT to any performance and backup issues. O&G CIOs must also support remote office/branch office (ROBO) operations. Data must flow reliably among centralized data centers, remote sites, and cloud storage repositories to support mission-critical applications. IT needs a solution that can facilitate data replication and minimize recovery times without overburdening IT staff and overloading WANs. In addition to the operational teams that depend on them, IT organizations must meet the needs of compliance officers who cannot afford data loss. Across every sector, compliance is an area of high risk, and compliance officers rely on data that is complete and readily available to satisfy strict regulations on company financial controls as well as HSE issues. In fracking and pipeline operations, for example, HSE regulations continue to evolve, and compliance relies on IT to maintain data securely without losses to preserve audit trails. A solution that retains data at the file level in an outage is a lifesaver for the compliance team. Workload is also an important consideration. When IT is overburdened with manual tasks for backup, replication,
7
and monitoring, the organization has limited ability to scale and introduce new technologies. To keep enterprises operational and secure, IT needs a flexible, scalable solution that automates VM backup and data replication and restores applications quickly.
Conclusion The high demands on IT in the energy sector necessitate a different support paradigm that targets availability instead of mere backup and replication. IT needs a fundamentally new kind of solution designed for the an operational organization. The modern availability solution must provide O&G IT with powerful capabilities including high-speed recovery, data loss avoidance, verified recoverability, fully leveraged data, and complete visibility.
Guidelines for Availability in the Oil & Gas Companies As O&G companies digitize more operations and move more data, IT needs a new approach that goes beyond traditional backup and focuses on high availability. Here are the challenges IT faces and the capabilities required to keep E&P, pipeline operations, and energy delivery. Reduced downtime Applications are deployed in mission-critical settings throughout O&G, and users are demanding less application
8
downtime and stronger guarantees of access to data. A true availability solution must provide instant recovery of entire VMs with RTOs under 15 minutes. It must enable IT to restart a failed VM directly from a deduped and compressed backup file and be flexible enough to work on both VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V infrastructures. Recovery of data Granular recovery capabilities are critical. IT needs to restore data down to the individual file level from an image-level backup. Efficient use of resources IT staff time and WAN bandwidth are important resources that are squandered with cumbersome legacy backup solutions. A true availability solution saves on operating expenses by decreasing backup and recovery times while empowering non storage staff to handle backups. This frees up administrators to work on other data center projects. Complete visibility A modern availability solution must provide visibility into virtualized environments and proactive monitoring and alerting of issues, so that IT can take action before operations are impacted. This prevents surprises, builds confidence in recoverability, and keeps IT out of “firefighting mode.”
9
Security Information regarding oil-well exploration, development, and production is highly classified and affected by government regulations. A solution must secure VM back-ups at the source and be capable of applying end-to-end AES 256-bit encryption selectively to secure backup files while avoiding negative impact on WAN performance. Data loss avoidance Compliance and operational groups require data preservation. An availability solution should eliminate the risk of catastrophic data loss by backing up virtual environments off-site in hosted backup repositories. Cloud functionality Cloud-based disaster recovery is gaining traction. A strong availability solution will move workloads in and out of the cloud automatically. Management of Complexity and Change Big data is growing exponentially, and applications are more interconnected. The toolset should be flexible and robust enough to work in organizations that are scaling up, increasing IT complexity, and running both vSphere and Hyper-V infrastructures.
10
Confidence in recoverability IT needs assurance that it can prevent business disruption by keeping key applications available and restoring every file, application, or virtual server. An availability solution must ensure business resiliency through automated backup and disaster recovery testing.
StoneFly's Solution Veeam has partnered with stonefly to provide state of the art storage solutions leveraging the StoneFly Scale-Out NAS Cloud-Storage in Azure. By combining StoneFly and Veeam solutions, customers can now by-pass the file size constraints within Microsoft Azure. Customers can now add capacity easily and quickly without sacrificing throughput or performance, and best-of-all, manage multiple Cloud Storage nodes with just a single-interface. The StoneFly Scale-Out NAS Cloud-Storage for Microsoft Azure not only solves the 1TB file size limit, but also allows the user to “Scale-Out” one or more volumes across multiple Microsoft Azure VMs to create a nearly unlimited amount of Storage for their Veeam-backups. Another benefit of the StoneFly Scale-Out NAS Cloud Storage is allowing the customers to only purchase the storage they need now and add more storage capacity as their
11
needs grow – making it a flexible and an affordable solution. StoneFly is the only cloud service provider in the market that provides backup, replication and disaster recovery solutions for Veeam in the Microsoft Azure cloud for businesses and governments in the Microsoft Azure government. The Deployment Guide for Veeam Cloud Connect using StoneFly Scale-Out NAS Cloud Storage in Microsoft Azure can be found on our official page. This solution is available in Microsoft Azure datacenters across the globe. With 4 datacenters in the US, 2 in Asia, 2 in Europe, 2 in Australia and 2 recently deployed datacenters in china. Your Virtual Dedicated Storage is hosted on Microsoft Azure’s world-class cloud storage, where you are in control of your own data. This solution adheres to stringent security and privacy standards including FIPS, FedRAMP, ISO and others.
The ul�mate backup and disaster recovery solu�on StoneFly’s Scale-Out Cloud Storage in Microsoft Azure can be used to: Scale-Out volumes across multiple nodes for nearly an unlimited amount of storage in each volume. Scale up your performance – data throughput aggregates as you add more storage nodes. Easily integrate with existing Active Directory servers to simplify setup and secure data access.
12
Management is easy: Only one GUI login is needed to manage all of the Cloud Storage nodes in the StoneFly Scale Out configuration in Microsoft Azure. Installation, management and scaling is simple to achieve at any size.”
13
