Introduction
Large oil companies have had a competitive advantage over most small independents because of their buying power, reputation, and having a myriad of companies seek their business. This equates to vendors specifically targeting larger oil companies, and has also meant that only the larger companies could seriously evaluate the latest trend in computing particularly suited for the energy industry: Computing On Demand (COD).

COD allows companies to buy computing cycles on an “as needed” basis. Oil companies focus on the business applications that provide competitive advantage and facilitate making sound leasing and drilling decisions with millions of dollars at risk. Meanwhile, the COD vendor provides the infrastructure that guarantees availability of the applications while supplying complete flexibility for rapid scaling up and down directly proportional to an oil company’s requirements.
Early adopters of COD found that there were inherent issues surrounding usage of this business model. Issues included the high costs associated with implementation and the logistics of software licensing, for example, which concluded with unpredictable costs and extended timeframes. These associated problems caused providers to abandon this business model, leaving energy companies still searching for a viable option.

A Better Way
CyrusOne, the leading Houston-based Data Center partnered with industry leaders in blade technologies to provide a comprehensive, cost-effective solution to the energy marketplace. The solution is comprehensive because it incorporates the hardware, system software, associated licensing costs and implementation into one bundled solution. Inevitably, this solution is more cost-effective and can be implemented more expediently than oil companies can do internally.

Implementation of blade servers from both manufacturers is currently underway at the CyrusOne Data Center. They have partnered with CyrusOne to offer a unique blend of services for any energy company investigating COD. Of key significance to the oil and gas industry, applications slated for the blade technology include reservoir and seismic data modeling. End results allow energy companies to leverage COD to make better decisions, achieve quicker time to market and ultimately, their drilling success ratios will increase significantly.

“Companies can even access their data or information on the Web,
reviewing it, collaborating, interpreting and essentially getting added
value from a virtual/shared infrastructure environment.”

Three tier service offering
Essentially, CyrusOne’s service offering to the energy marketplace is three-tiered. One, large clusters require unprecedented amounts of power and cooling and this Houston data center is one of the few facilities with such capabilities. With blades providing inherent advantages in footprint and ease of maintenance, many energy companies are incorporating this technology into their current and future IT architecture.
However, many companies are concluding that even their own large data centers do not have the cooling infrastructure and or the power infrastructure to run blades. So, they are facing the decision of either spending several million dollars retrofitting their current facility, incurring the costs and timeframes required to build a new one, or conversely partnering with an outsourcing provider of IT infrastructure, with most decisions being made for outsourcing.

In the second tier, CyrusOne will actually provide the raw compute so that oil companies can come to the data center and provision cycles on an “as needed” basis. And, three, CyrusOne will be launching a suite of mainstream market-leading upstream oil and gas software products for availability on an on-demand basis, providing excellent choices for all energy companies.

Additionally, all these service offerings are provided through a vendor-neutral approach, on multiple platforms that can host any company’s hardware platform, along with a variety of software. This neutral approach also allows oil companies to get unbiased consultation on the best strategy for deploying capital and investing in software and associated costs such as licensing from CyrusOne that does this on a daily basis 24/7/365 for themselves and their customers.
More and more companies are seeing the viability of an ongoing data center working relationship that, for practical purposes, has not existed until recently. While ASPs (Application Service Providers) are a subset of today’s tools, with this new approach oil companies get the entire functionality of tools ranging from ones for robust reservoir modeling to simulation. Computing on Demand means more for less and with the partnerships that CyrusOne has formed, COD can be a reality for all energy companies.

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Blake McLane is VP, Houston-based CyrusOne (www.cyrusone.com)