Huawei launches data centre for UAE oil-producer ADMA-OPCO
Tue 8 Nov 2016
Chinese tech multinational Huawei Technologies has announced the completion of its data centre build for the Abu Dhabi Marine Operating Company (ADMA-OPCO), a state-owned oil producer in the United Arab Emirates.
The data centre will replace three existing plants, and is chiefly tasked with processing the extraordinary volume of data received from the exploratory and production facets of ADMA-OPCO’s operations.
Dr. Alaeddin Al-Badawna, Chief Information Officer at ADMA-OPCO, revealed at the inauguration of the CRDC that the new construction anticipates a 30% drop in the company’s operation and maintenance costs. Al-Badawna also observed: “Virtualization-based cloud computing can ensure high service continuity and greatly facilitate our business expansion. In addition, Huawei’s geographic disaster redundancy technology provides enhanced security for our key business data and applications.”
The ‘Cloud Ready Data Center’ conforms to Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) standards, and features centralised IT resources, with collaborative blade server management and automated resource provisioning. The set-up also features geographic data redundancy, utilising a shadow site at 200km distance.
He Tao, Huawei’s President of Huawei Middle East Enterprise Business Department, commented: “This Cloud Ready Data Center will support more flexible services and applications, helping ADMA-OPCO excel in the fierce market competition. The commercial rollout of [CRDC] is a testament to Huawei’s understanding of the specific needs of this particular business and positions Huawei as a leader among data center solution providers for global high-end oil and gas customers, as well as accelerate Huawei’s technological influence in this area and more.”
Fossil fuel exploratory operations can output millions of data points per minute, with any outages representing potentially enormous losses – and any long-term data loss running into a cost of millions. Gas and oil companies are frequently required to build proprietary data centres in some of the least desirable and least accommodating situations in the sector and need to make informed choices between the obvious portability and resilience of modular, and the improved performance and scale of dedicated builds.
The fields involved in data generation for gas and oil companies includes geology interpretation and well-field optimisation, as well as high-number data streams to monitor established pipeline and production flows.
