Mitigating IT and Business Challenges in the Oil and Gas Industry with High Availability and Disaster Recovery

Mitigating IT and Business Challenges in the Oil and Gas Industry with High Availability and Disaster Recovery

The oil and gas industry is a critical sector in the global economy, providing energy to power transportation, heat homes, and fuel manufacturing. However, the industry is facing significant challenges, both in terms of its operations and its IT infrastructure. High availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) solutions can help alleviate these challenges, providing companies with a robust IT infrastructure that is resilient to disruptions and downtime.

IT Challenges in the Oil and Gas Industry

The oil and gas industry faces a range of IT challenges, including complexity of operations, aging infrastructure, security and data protection, cost control, and regulatory compliance.

Complexity of Operations

The oil and gas industry is complex and highly regulated, requiring companies to manage a range of processes and systems involved in exploration, production, transportation, and refining. This complexity can make it difficult to manage IT systems effectively and efficiently.

HA/DR solutions can help simplify IT operations by providing a consolidated, integrated approach to IT management. By consolidating IT systems and processes, streamlining workflows, and reducing the number of applications and tools used, companies can reduce complexity and improve efficiency.

Aging Infrastructure

Many oil and gas companies operate aging IT infrastructure, which can be costly to maintain and prone to downtime. Legacy systems can also be difficult to integrate with newer technologies and can pose security risks.

HA/DR solutions can help modernize IT infrastructure by providing a phased approach to modernization. By prioritizing critical systems for modernization, gradually retiring legacy systems, and replacing them with newer technologies, companies can reduce the costs of maintaining legacy systems and improve the reliability and security of their IT infrastructure. In some configurations, HA/DR systems such as sophisticated failover clustering can also provide a means of upgrading and maintaining critical systems with near zero downtime.

Security and Data Protection

Oil and gas companies handle sensitive and confidential data, such as drilling data, production data, and financial information. This data is attractive to cyber attackers, and companies need to implement robust security measures to protect against cyber threats.

HA/DR solutions can enable a multi-layered approach to security that includes network security, endpoint security, and data protection. By implementing firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and encryption technologies, companies can protect against cyber threats and ensure the confidentiality and integrity of their data.

Cost Control

The oil and gas industry is subject to volatile commodity prices, which can impact profitability. To stay competitive, companies must effectively manage their costs, including the IT costs associated with unexpected downtime, which results in lost revenue and productivity.

HA/DR solutions can help reduce costs by providing automatic failover recovery for critical applications and minimizing unplanned downtime.

With HA/DR solutions, critical applications are automatically failed over to other active nodes when there is a failure. After the node has recovered, the data is automatically copied over to the attached storage and the application resumes. With that, unplanned downtimes are potentially averted.

Regulatory Compliance

The oil and gas industry is subject to a range of regulatory requirements, including safety, environmental, and financial regulations. Compliance can be complex and time-consuming, and non-compliance can result in fines and reputational damage.

HA/DR solutions can help companies comply with regulations by providing redundant systems and disaster recovery plans. By ensuring that critical data is protected in the event of a disruption, companies can reduce the risk of non-compliance and avoid fines and reputational damage.

Business Challenges in the Oil and Gas Industry

In addition to IT challenges, the oil and gas industry faces a range of business challenges, including declining reserves, increasing competition, and environmental concerns.

HA/DR solutions can help address these challenges by providing companies with a resilient IT infrastructure that can support the business operations needed to address these challenges.

For example, HA/DR solutions protection for continuous emissions monitoring systems (CEMS) ensures they have uninterrupted measurement of greenhouse gas emissions

HA/DR solutions can ensure production equipment can deliver real-time monitoring and analysis of production equipment needed to increase output and efficiency.

Increasing Competition

The oil and gas industry is highly competitive, with companies competing on a global scale for resources, market share, and profitability. As a result, companies need to be able to operate at maximum efficiency and effectiveness to remain competitive.

HA/DR solutions can help companies improve their competitiveness by ensuring that critical systems and data are available and accessible at all times. This can help to minimize downtime and maintain business continuity, which can be critical in the event of a disruption.

By implementing HA/DR solutions, companies can improve their ability to respond to market demands, make quick decisions, and execute operations efficiently. This can help to reduce costs, improve productivity, and enhance profitability, all of which are critical for success in a highly competitive industry.

Conclusion

The oil and gas industry is facing significant challenges in terms of its operations and IT infrastructure. These challenges include complexity of operations, aging infrastructure, security and data protection, cost control, and regulatory compliance. High availability and disaster recovery can help companies overcome these challenges by ensuring that critical systems and data are available and accessible at all times.

Implementing high availability and disaster recovery solutions can help companies improve their competitiveness, reduce costs, enhance productivity, and maintain business continuity. By leveraging these solutions, companies can stay ahead of the competition and continue to thrive in a dynamic and complex industry.

Contact SIOS today for High Availability and Disaster Recovery Solutions.

Reproduce with permission from SIOS

Hitachi Moves Leading Insurance Company’s Mission Critical System to Azure Ensuring High Availability

Hitachi Moves Leading Insurance Company’s Mission Critical System to Azure Ensuring High Availability

SIOS DataKeeper chosen for its ability to enable data replication on Azure

A major insurance company wanted to migrate its mission-critical system called ‘channel system’ to the cloud. Channel system included both an in-house system, used by its employees and call centers, and a third-party system used by its sales agencies. The system is positioned as the core system of the company’s business – even a short system failure and downtime would impact the business largely.

The channel system operated in an on-premises, virtualized platform provided by Hitachi. However, the hardware was aging and support for the middleware was ending. This led the insurance company to launch a project to update the infrastructure and move the system to the public cloud to cut running costs. Hitachi took on the responsibility for configuring the system for this project.

The Environment

The channel system’s architecture mostly consisted of Windows software. “We decided to adopt Azure as the cloud platform as we could confirm that there was a high affinity between the system architecture and Microsoft Azure, and it would be the most cost-effective option. There were some things that cannot be changed, but we focused on placing first priority on the customer’s needs,” said Takuro Nishino, System Engineer at Hitachi.

The Challenge

One of the company’s requirements for the new infrastructure was to build a cluster configuration. Additionally, the database, which was built with a cluster configuration using DBMS, along with the job management middleware ‘JP1’ had to be configured in a cluster node in order to secure high availability (HA) even after the cloud migration. The existing system used WSFC (Windows Server Failover Clustering) to configure the HA cluster using Windows Server functions with a shared storage (SAN).

However, as of 2019, it was not possible to have a SAN-based configuration in Azure. Changing the HA software was considered as an option, but, “Considering the impact on the system, the priority was to move the system to the cloud while maintaining the application and infrastructure architecture as much as possible.” said Nishino. Hitachi decided to look for a solution that will both maintain the WSFC cluster configuration and replicate data without the SAN, while using the same HA software.

The Evaluation

After some research, Hitachi found SIOS DataKeeper, a data replication software that can build a cluster and integrate with WSFC on Azure. DataKeeper is an Azure-certified product, which enables you to synchronously replicate data from the active node to the standby node. By using DataKeeper with WSFC, the company would be able to make JP1 redundant. Hitachi also officially supported and had experience with this configuration. “DataKeeper was the only solution that made our project feasible – migrating to the cloud while maintaining the cluster configuration, without changing the HA software,” Nishino recalled.

Along with Hitachi, Hitachi Solutions, having a track record of implementing DataKeeper, took part in this project by creating detailed design documents and construction procedure manuals. The actual work of implementing DataKeeper was done by members of the Insurance company’s IT department.

The Solution

Hitachi Solutions created the basic designs and detailed designs after defining the requirements, and also provided templates to make it easier for the insurance company to implement the system. During this process, thanks to DataKeeper’s easy-to-understand features such as the parameter settings. Hitachi Solutions was able to create a procedure manual without any difficulty by simply customizing the default values to suit the customer environment. Hitachi Solutions also created a DataKeeper testing environment within its own local environment to identify any issues in advance – this process helped them create accurate procedure manuals and configure the production environment smoothly.

The Results

In October 2022, the insurance company’s system migration to Azure was completed. Since the migration, the HA cluster configuration – DataKeeper and WSFC – has been operating steadily. The company agrees that achieving an HA cluster configuration this way, without changing the system architecture or HA software, was the best way to migrate the system to Azure.

Hitachi and Hitachi Solutions were able to succeed in the insurance company’s cloud migration project by integrating DataKeeper within the HA cluster configuration. “The fact that we were able to introduce DataKeeper in our customer’s project was a great achievement. We’d like to apply our knowledge and achievements gained from this project in other Azure projects as well,” said Kenta Otsuka, Sales at Hitachi. “In fact, we have proposed DataKeeper to other clients who are also considering a migration of their systems to Azure. The experience of working with SIOS Technology through Hitachi Solutions and the skills and knowledge we gained will definitely contribute to our business in the future.”

“When the project began, Azure didn’t have a shared disk function, so DataKeeper was the only option. Even though SAN-based configuration is currently available in Azure, based on the fact that we were able to achieve a smooth migration and stable operation in this project by implementing DataKeeper, DataKeeper will continue to be a solution when redundancy is required in Azure migration and configuration projects,” said Satoshi Noguchi, System Engineer at Hitachi.

Download case study here

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

White Paper: High Availability for Business-Critical Applications

White Paper: High Availability for Business-Critical Applications

Most organizations today rely on business-critical databases and applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), data warehouses, e-commerce applications, customer relationship management (CRM), financial systems, supply chain management, and business intelligence systems. When a system, database, or application fails, these organizations require high availability protection to keep systems up and running and minimize the risk of lost revenue, unproductive employees, and unhappy customers.

This guide explains why it’s important to ensure your business-critical applications are highly available, explores the technical challenges associated with various high availability strategies, describes industry-specific challenges, and explains how multi-cloud environments add new challenges and opportunities for high availability.

Download here

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Webinar: A Day in the Life of an SAP Technical Architect and the future of a Data Center

Webinar: A Day in the Life of an SAP Technical Architect and the future of a Data Center

Register for the On-Demand Webinar

SAP ERP systems run multiple essential business operations from production lines to sales, distribution, finance and much more. Naturally, the dependency on uptime in today’s emerging digital world is becoming greater. How does an organization go about developing, designing and implementing highly available SAP solutions? Join Bobby Jagdev, as he guides attendees through a typical day of solution design with customers. From shaping requirements to solution design, product selection and finally helping to structure end-to-end architectures. In this session, Bobby will also touch on how the future of data centers will evolve, and how pivotal High Availability may become for data center solutions of the future.

Webinar: Disaster Resilient SQL Server on AWS without the need for Enterprise Edition

Webinar: Disaster Resilient SQL Server on AWS without the need for Enterprise Edition

Register for the On-Demand Webinar

Did you know there are several factors impacting your workload performance, cost and availability? There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to running your SQL Server workloads in the cloud, and you may not need to upgrade. Join this session to learn about strategies to stretch your IT budget dollars while optimizing your database performance on AWS.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS