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Premier Oil have a number of geologists working on various North Sea projects who are currently dispersed between their London, Aberdeen and Stavanger offices. While their roles and responsibilities are different, frequent collaboration is required on seismic interpretation projects, using tools such as Kingdom. Historically this has posed major challenges for the IS teams at each site; deploying applications, managing data and collaborating their analysis and results. Consequently, when the Group IS Manager discussed the concept of “Remote Access to 3D applications” with ISN Solutions, it captured his interest.

In April 2012, ISN engineers deployed a Proof of Concept installation of Citrix XenDesktop for Pro Graphics. It is an extension of the widely adopted Virtual Desktop Infrastructure solution, but instead harnesses the compute power of a physical, high spec, graphics card to power 3D applications. An existing Dell T-series workstation in Aberdeen was repurposed as a XenDesktop Pro Graphics host and a Windows 2008 server was built up as a XenDesktop Controller. Once fully configured, geologists in London and Stavanger were able to browse to a website hosted by the XenDesktop Controller and launch a remote desktop session to the XenDesktop Pro Graphics host. Because the XenDesktop host had a powerful nVidia Quadro graphics card, the geologists were able to work using dual monitors at a 1920×1200 HD resolution.

Initial feedback has been positive. One geologist in Stavanger, whose only option prior to this PoC was to use VNC to a desktop in Aberdeen, is very happy with the improvement in performance when using Kingdom. Other applications and usage scenarios will be tested throughout the rest of the PoC which will run until the end of May.

We have new projects starting soon and need to expand our team. If you are passionate about working in IT and are interested in new opportunities at our growing company, please check out our list of current vacancies.

Strictly no agencies.

Low cost, high bandwidth satellite is on its way

Following on from the recent Ka-band successes for the European broadband market, it now seems that high speed, permanently connected, affordable bandwidth over satellite is firmly on its way for businesses, and that can only be good news for the oil and gas industry!

With the launch of further Ka-band satellites from Inmarsat and Telenor by 2014, in addition to existing services from Eutelsat, these services should eventually provide the global coverage that operators in oil exploration and production need. When used in conjunction with the new Ka-band marine VSAT systems from Seatel, for example, it now seems highly likely that bandwidth of up to 50Mbps will be available to offshore, on a point-to-point basis, and we all know what that means for voice, video and applications to offshore!

Future investment

Although costs are still a bit of a secret for point-to-point links, ISN feel that because of the technology used, operators can expect perhaps four or more times the bandwidth for the same existing expenditure.  We expect that companies like Telenor, Inmarsat, Arqiva, Nessco and Harris CapRock will, over time, invest in the necessary Ka-band ground earth station equipment, and that will speed up the replacement of older, conventional C and Ku-band systems.

Available now

But for those of you don’t know, limited Ka-band services are here already and you can have them tomorrow! I’d love to hear any views on how Ka-band might change things in your business. Please comment below or give me a call on 020 7313 9900.

Like many companies involved in the oil industry, ISN get a lot of cold calls asking us to attend or sponsor events taking place around the world. However we were lucky that some of the most worthwhile ones we attended last year took place within walking distance of our office in Notting Hill. This year we decided to sponsor SMi’s 5th annual conference on Oil & Gas Communications on 21-22 March. Last year’s conference was a great opportunity to meet people involved in comms at oil and service companies. This year we were looking forward to some entertaining presentations, catching up with old friends and meeting some new ones. Here are some of my own personal highlights from the presentations given:

Professor Ifiok Otung, Professor of Satellite Communications at Glamorgan University, started by reclaiming the word “bandwidth” from the sales and marketing world and explained the science behind satellite bit-rate and the limitations that prevent faster links. He issued a challenge to satellite providers asking why they will not break with the status quo and simply design satellites with bigger antennae to give us faster satellite communications.

Hassan Karim, Saudi Aramco’s charismatic Communications Engineer, explored some of the potential security threats to the oil industry in a new era where the systems exposed to threat (attack surface) is much greater and the sources of danger (attack vectors) have increased exponentially. He showed us how attacks on VSAT might take place and provided some suggestions for countering them. Conferences can soon become dull if there are no questions from the floor, but there was no danger of this when Hassan took his seat in the audience.

Dennis Vause, Tullow Oil’s new Head of Infrastructure, discussed some of the challenges of delivering comms to onshore well sites in Africa and made the point that a slower more expensive VSAT link that works all the time is far better than a fast, cheap fibre or WiMax solution that works sometimes.

Hugh McIntyre, Head of IT infrastructure at Wood Group outlined the company’s value system: safety, relationships, social responsibility, people, innovation, financial responsibility and integrity. Living those values is a key reason why they are one of the most successful and fastest growing service companies in the industry. He illustrated his talk with stories of how those values were applied in their work worldwide. At ISN we agree wholeheartedly that it takes more than technical skill to deliver the best IT, comms and services to customers.

Kassim Al Hassani has been involved for many years in the comms regulatory institutions of Iraq and his explanation of how things are done in Iraq was invaluable for our own new projects in Kurdistan.

Our pick of forthcoming events relating to IT infrastructure in the oil industry are, Finding Petroleum’s conference: IT Infrastructure for the Digital Oilfield in Aberdeen on 7 June and SMi’s Oil and Gas Cyber Security Conference in March 2013.

Come and meet us at the Aberdeen event where we will be presenting our own experiences of how oilfield technology is evolving and looking ahead to future possibilities.

We had a bit of a celebration on the helideck last night for the West Leo crossing the Equator and the Prime meridian at the same time. I’ve attached a couple of photos, as I was the designated photographer. It’s a once in a lifetime  experience, and being part of the team on the rig up is also pretty special! 

Neil McKay – ISN Network systems consultant and proud Emerald Shellback!

Yesterday Citrix held their annual conference exclusively for accredited partners. I was fortunate enough to be invited. The event covers a number of aspects: partner updates, technical training, marketing plans, etc. But the most compelling is the news about product developments. Here are some interesting points that I took away from the event:

Consumerisation increasing

Citrix are probably one of the few companies that embrace, rather than fear, the consumerisation of IT. They illustrated this by pointing out that in Q4 of 2011, Apple sold more iPads than HP sold PCs. I find this quite a shocking statistic and it shows that IT departments have to be prepared to deliver IT services to staff owned devices as well as corporate owned. Basically, users will demand access to IT systems from anywhere and on any device. Obviously Citrix XenDesktop is the perfect solution to meet these types of requirements.

XenDesktop improvements

On the subject of XenDesktop, which is now Citrix’s flagship product, a great stride forward has been made for the forthcoming 5.6 release – Private Virtual Disks. For those that aren’t familiar with the underlying technology that XenDesktop users, here’s a brief explanation; you can create individual virtual machines for each user, which they can personalise in any way they like, including application installations. This, however, consumes lots of disk space on the SAN and still requires management of each and every machine. The alternative, is a cloned approach, where a “Master” VM is created and cloned numerous times. This eases the support burden but gives users little scope for personalisation or flexibility of software.

The concept of Private Virtual Disks marries the benefits of each solution to provide a “Master” image which can be easily managed, but also an additional disk assigned to each user for personalisation and additional software installs. I see this a huge benefit, as it will allow the IT team to create a standardised Windows 7 desktop installed with all the core apps e.g. Office Suite, Anti-Virus etc., update it when needed, but still have the flexibility to install ad-hoc applications for users when needed. A win for both the IT department and the end user is quite rare, but this seems to achieve exactly that.

Integrating cloud topologies

Citrix fly the “Cloud” banner pretty high – they paid $100m for the cloud.com domain name (though I’m not sure how they are planning to get a return on that investment). Therefore, it’s no surprise that most of their other products have the word Cloud in them e.g. CloudBridge, CloudGateway, CloudPortal etc. CloudGateway is an interesting concept, it gives the IT Department a method to control and simplify access to external systems that their users need access to e.g. SalesForce, LinkedIn, Office365 etc. By linking the account details of each site to a user’s Windows credentials and publishing shortcuts on a revamped Web Interface, IT has visibility of how these services are used and the user doesn’t have to remember numerous passwords.

Sharefile – DropBox for grownups

Another “Cloud” announcement – Citrix have acquired the ShareFile.com service. This is likely in response to many users taking IT into their own hands and using services like DropBox and SendFile to move large company documents around that may be too large to send via the corporate email system.

Feel free to contact me if you’d like to discuss any of these new technologies in greater detail.

Paul Reed
020 7313 9900

Afren now ranked 3rd in UK main board peer group

After the entry of ISN client, Afren plc (AFR.L), into the Kurdistan region of Iraq, they are now ranked 3rd amongst UK independent oil companies by last reported net 2p and 2C reserves.

The acquisition of Kurdistan’s Barda Rash and Ain Sifni assets increase Afren’s recoverable reserves from 136 mmboe to 1,026 mmboe.

ISN continue to provide IT support and consultancy to Afren at their London HQ as well as Houston, Lagos and their African production well sites.

ISN are currently working on a drilling comms project for Tullow Oil plc Ghana (TLW.L), the UK’s largest independent, equipping the Sedco Energy rig with VSAT and IT systems.

ISN has worked with 4th ranked Premier Oil plc (PMO.L) for a number of years on a range of IT and comms projects.

Many congratulations to Afren on their newest acquisitions and continued growth!

Make no mistake, despite very public emarrassments at Sony and Amazon, cloud computing is here to stay. IT providers need to embrace the paradigm and IT users need to see beyond the hype and plan the best delivery platform for the services their business depends on.

(In fact the cloud paradigm is not so new: BT deliver voice and the BBC deliver TV and radio from “the cloud” to customers who have no involvement with the technology or processes that the services depend on).

Sony left a security loophole which allowed thousands of Playstation users’ details to be revealed. Amazon carried out a network upgrade which went wrong and denied companies access to AWS services for 10 days.

There are two lessons that I would draw from these recent incidents:

One: No one is too big to fail

The first is not to make assumptions about the performance, reliability or security of cloud IT services just because they are delivered by a huge multinational. You would imagine that Microsoft, Google, Sony and Amazon has armies of highly qualified and experienced IT staff, manning vast datacentres providing the finest available IT services. You’d be right, but that didn’t stop all four organisations having falures in systems or security relating to cloud services in the last couple of years. There will undoubtedly be more.

An intelligent approach to using cloud services would be to ensure that you do not place too much reliance on one provider: Amazon client companies who handled the AWS outage best had actually planned for such an eventuality and had a failover plan ready. Some were able to get going again in less 15 minutes.

The same logic that applies to any IT system applies to cloud services: plan for the day when it will fail and don’t assume that it is immune because of a particular brand name.

Two: Reversed economy of scale?

The other lesson is that big providers, despite having virtually limitless resources, do make attractive targets for organised hacking campaigns. It wasn’t heavily publicised at the time but in January 2010, Google discovered that they were being comprehensively hacked by the Chinese. The doors were subsequently bolted and Google even took steps to hack the perpetrators back. However, given that the Chinese government are likely to have every line of Google code up to January 2010, at what point should businesses become confident enough to switch their email to the Google platform?

Oil & gas companies have plenty to worry about on this score since the global energy industry was targeted by a well-organised network hacking campaign in Februuary 2011 – dubbed Night Dragon by McAfee.

Our recommendation is that companies should examine the pros and cons of any IT service, cloud or onsite, from the perspectives of performance, security, service levels and features as well as cost. A knee-jerk reaction aimed at reducing the cost of an expensive IT department could easily backfire if the decision were entered into without some detailed analysis beforehand.

A friend was telling me recently about his company’s general frustration with their IT support provider. (I’d love to quote for a better service but they are unfortunately tied in to a long contract with this provider).

Vicious circle

Despite the fact that the support techs involved are hard working, competent guys with great customer service skills, the client company’s productivity was suffering and frustration levels were rising.

The support people did not seem to value the users’ time and thought nothing of spending several hours on a user’s PC working through an issue. Persistence is often laudable but in this case the user was held back from her work for half a day leading to a knock on effect on productivity throughout the company. This kind of cure often causes more pain than the original problem.

Priorities were decided by a combination of who-shouts-loudest and first-in-first-out. The same faults occurred time and again and lessons learned by one tech are not shared with others.

The support techs’ hard work, dedication and technical skill were simply not enough to deliver the productivity gains expectated from the company’s investment in up to date IT systems. Users and IT provider are caught in a vicious circle where the users’ level of frustration continues to escalate.

Structure

In my opinion things will not improve at this company unless some structure is applied to the support effort, such as the ITIL framework for instance. Some may dismiss ITIL as being over-bureaucratic, designed by civil servants with too much time on their hands or assume it is a job creation scheme created by and for the IT industry.

Our own use of ITIL at ISN has provided us with a toolkit of best practice which deliver real benefits which result in happier users long term. Adopting just a few ITIL best-practice approaches would unglue the wheels and increase productivity for my friend’s company and result in bottom line savings.
Just to pluck a few examples out of the air:

• Having senior engineers dedicated to “problem management” would address the underlying causes of common faults and prevent them recurring
• Agreeing a method with management for “incident prioritisation” would reduce impact on the company’s core activities
• Developing a searchable knowledgebase from information logged regarding problem resolution would shorten fix times

The fact is that most office workers can’t get their job done without reliable IT systems. With the pace of modern working life, any hold up wastes time and money and increases stress levels for end user and IT staff alike. Adoption of ITIL does not have to be all-or-nothing; a company can choose the elements that fit its business requirements and culture.

This is the kind of IT work ISN does best

Check out the comms dome we put on the bridge of the Armada Perkasa FPSO for Afren in the YouTube movie below. A floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) unit is a floating vessel used by the offshore industry for the processing and storage of oil and gas.

ISN were engaged by Afren to project manage and execute the voice and data communications parts of the project and delivered on time despite challenging deadlines.

This FPSO was fitted out for Afren’s Okoro Setu production project which achieved first oil in 2008 and still continues producing today, an average of 18,872 barrels per day in 2009.

Call us on 020 7313 8300 if you want to know more about ISN’s work for the oil & gas industry