Wipro- Upstream storage solution for oil & gas industry

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Wipro Upstream Storage Solution

WIPRO TECHNOLOGIES

Wipro’s Upstream Storage Solution for Oil & Gas Industry



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Executive summary………………………………………………………………………3

Business Appreciation of Upstream Storage Challenges…………..….4

Wipro’s Upstream Storage Solution………………………………….………….5

Wipro’s Approach…………………………………………………………………….....9

Wipro Solution Differentiators…………………………………………….…..…..9

Thought for the industry……………………………………………………….…….10

TABLE OF CONTENTS



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Executive Summary

Ever increasing oil and gas upstream storage cost is a matter of concern and there is an enterprise drive towards reducing the cost of storage. Increase in storage cost is primarily attributed to an increase in data volume and inefficiencies in the current storage landscape. To overcome this challenge there is a need for a long lasting solution covering multiple dimensions, i.e. business process, technology, people, and practices

We believe that the storage challenge faced by the industry cannot be addressed by storage (service) providers alone. To aid analysis and construction of a solution, the storage challenge was split into four areas; Business Centric, Technology, Process and Services. With this approach, Wipro has defined an Upstream Storage Reference Architecture (WUSRA) with the intent to build “Upstream Storage as a Service” for the industry. “Upstream Storage as a Service” is not a “rip and replace” approach, rather, it is a step change transformational initiative rooted in optimization and compliance which overlies existing storage investments.

WUSRA is based on a modular, component based architecture that is open to extension and modification. This enables companies to leverage the latest developments in the market, such as low latency, high speed storage to address specific needs of High Performance Computing (HPC) and low‐cost cloud‐based commodity storage. WUSRA is comprised of the following layers ‐

• Upstream Storage Process Management layer: deals with workflows and processes that automate a number of the tasks traditionally preformed by the end user to effectively utilize storage.

• Upstream Information Management Layer ‐ manages and optimizes the use of storage, based on the characteristics of the data.

• Upstream Storage management layer ‐ optimizes storage usage at the technical level, using storage technologies such as de‐duplication, compression, etc., techniques that are transparent both to the end‐user and the applications.

• Upstream Physical Storage Infrastructure – comprises the actual physical storage infrastructure for upstream, with different tiers of storage and HPC infrastructure

• Horizontal services ‐ consists of services that deal with data governance, service management, change management, etc., that are important for overall deployment and implementation of the solution

Wipro’s solution is vendor neutral, process and service delivery driven and will leverage best‐of‐breed technology solutions from the market to address the storage challenges faced by oil and gas companies on an ongoing basis. We are confident this solution will enable:

• Enhanced performance and reduced time to market

• Elimination of wasted and more effective use of storage

• Adoption and scalability of best‐of‐breed technology

• Cost effectiveness (consumption‐based commercial models)



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Business Appreciation of Upstream Storage Challenges

Upstream storage management represents a massive challenge for the upstream industry due to exponential increases in data volumes and inefficiencies in current data management practices across the enterprise. Mandates such as enhanced oil recovery (EOR) from existing fields and the search for new accumulations, coupled to the requirements of new technologies ensures data growth in the upstream business remains unavoidable. These new technologies exploit recent advances in compute power and acquisition processes to deliver more granular data which needs to be processed quickly utilizing multiple iterations. Advances in seismic processing and interpretation with the increased use of 4D over and above developments in 2D and 3D data requires large quantities of storage space and computing power. High Performance Storage is required to service High Performance Computing solutions being used to process and image data. The industry continues to witness a near exponential increase in real‐time data collection for production and drilling operations; ‘smart wells’ deliver more data over the life of a field, compounding issues related to volumes of data. External factors such as regulatory requirements across different geographies will influence the generation and retention schedules of digital content, to satisfy reporting requirements, sharing and availability of data. Regulatory requirements in addition to Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning may also influence the need for multiple data centers across the globe which may, in turn, limit the range of possible storage optimization. Internal factors such as enterprise‐level efficiency drives (i.e. “deliver more with less”, implementing enterprise‐wide knowledge management capabilities) serve to increase the complexity of the storage problem.

These challenges shape our responses to upstream data management requirements such as optimization and management of data growth, reduction in unit storage costs, data availability and accessibility, and the utilization of the most appropriate storage platforms.

Data storage is a key component of the upstream data management landscape, which is itself an essential component of the wider subsurface or petro‐technical compute environment (PCE). Wipro believes that it is vital to view storage in this context and therefore essential that tactical solutions and longer term strategies facilitate and enhance customers current data management initiatives and their petro‐technical environments.

With an emerging asset‐based data strategy, the business ‘owns’ the data but ‘management’ of data is spread between the business and IT. Data management processes are globally inconsistent and while initiatives to standardize exist regionally, they are not fully implemented. Communication issues, the lack of integration and common processes, procedures and tools (PPTs), multiple ownership/ accountability for data and data issues combined with users’ lack of confidence in data retrieved from corporate data sources add further complexity to the upstream data management challenge.



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As users move assets though the exploration and production life‐cycle, numerous applications will be used to access, process and output data. It is vital that any underlying infrastructure is configured to enable this workflow and facilitate access to the right data, in the right place at the right time. Storage must be performant, scalable, cost effective, transparent and seamless in its delivery of data to the users.

Wipro Upstream Storage Solution WUSRA is a tool to address these upstream data management and storage challenges and deliver a complete storage service to our customers under a single window based on following key solution principles;

• Provide customers with a best‐in‐class storage solution

• Provide a scalable solution that is responsive to future business requirements and technology innovations (i.e. cloud)

• Provide a service‐based solution to enable greater flexibility regarding sourcing models (right shored, off shored, etc.)

• Provide solutions with minimal user disruption

• Build upon current storage landscape where possible rather than “Rip & Replace”

• Enable year on year improvement on Total Cost of Ownership/unit of storage across all storage tiers

• Maximize automation to minimize or avoid manual storage management

We believe that the challenges facing the industry cut across all four layers of the upstream storage landscape namely the business process layer, the information management layer, the storage infrastructure management layer and the physical storage layer. WUSRA provides a solution framework covering the major components of a storage solution, optimizing cost and harnessing efficiencies across all four layers, as illustrated in figure 1.

While many storage solutions available today address many aspects of the storage infrastructure management layer and the physical infrastructure layer, we believe there is no single solution which addresses all four layers, or addresses the challenge with a business‐process/workflow‐centric approach.

We see many opportunities to improve storage efficiencies by integrating standard and custom built solutions and technical innovations with a goal to optimize storage within the infrastructure management layer. The services wrapper of Wipro’s solution is a comprehensive and innovative enabler for the implementation of large storage transformation initiatives.



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The Storage Process Management layer is the interface between the business users and the storage, enabling the automation of tasks derived from the workflows and processes the end user performs when utilizing the storage. The abstraction of the upstream data processing workflow when combined with a tight coupling between technical applications (treated as jobs by the architecture), business workflows, IT workflows and back‐end technical data storage delivers enhanced control over use of storage.

The Information Management layer manages and optimizes the use of storage based on data characteristics. Transparent data movement is enabled by policy and decision engines (e.g. on‐site versus on‐cloud) which also provide analytical services for attributes such as cost, domain, compute and data staging while also ensuring that data is staged to the correct tier of physical storage. In addition there will be data staging engines that manage automated Just‐in‐Time (JIT) data movement across storage tiers, including cloud storage if appropriate, based on policy engine decisions.



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The Storage Infrastructure Management layer optimizes storage usage at the technical level, using standard storage optimization technologies such as de‐duplication, compression, etc., together with new, innovative engineering components (which may be custom‐built) such as virtual tape libraries and cloud‐based archival of data.

The Infrastructure layer comprises the actual physical storage infrastructure that makes up the different tiers of storage, including public/hybrid cloud storage and HPC storage infrastructure.

There is a need for a strong integrated services framework to enable effective implementation of the above solution across all the layers. These services span across the solution layers as depicted in the architecture diagram. Thereby WUSRA enables implementation of an Upstream Storage as a Service (USTaaS) platform. Figure 2 depicts the Unified System Integration Service model.

Figure2 ‐ Upstream Storage Unified System Integration Service Model



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Figure 3 depicts the organization of operational services in the Unified Sustenance Service Model.

Figure 3 ‐ Upstream Storage Unified System Integration Service Model

Overall, WUSRA supports and ensures centralized governance and services, maximized reuse, shared best practices and vendor agnostic best‐of‐breed technology adoption, including cloud.



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Wipro’s Approach

Wipro has a three‐step process to implementing WUSRA. This process enables Wipro to work with a client’s technology and solution providers to retain what is required from the client’s existing storage architecture.

Assessment phase: The aim of the assessment phase is to define short, medium and long term storage solutions. The outcome of the assessment is a customer specific Storage Reference Architecture (SRA) derived from the principles encapsulated in WUSRA. This will include the identification and scope of a pilot scenario and an assessment report covering recommendations and a road‐map. Wipro has a range of assessment frameworks and templates to fast‐track this stage.

Wipro’s assessment teams are multi‐skilled and include leading industry Subject Matter Experts providing deep domain knowledge of upstream business process, upstream information management, storage technologies, service delivery models and architecture.

Pilot Build and Deployment phase: The pilot scenario defined during the assessment phase will be implemented to test and verify the outcome and lay a foundation for implementing the solution on a broader scale across the enterprise, at a state, regional or global level.

Factory Deployment phase: Following a successful pilot, a deployment model for the client’s SRA will be developed and mandated to meet state, regional or global requirements (as appropriate) while retaining sensitivity to local or site‐based variations/requirements. Deployment models will be right‐sized to suit locations (small, medium or large sites) and road‐maps will account for multiple geographies and are backed‐up by detailed implementation plan covering all aspect of USaaS.

Wipro Solution Differentiators Wipro believes it benefits from the following solution differentiators

1. Wipro’s defined Upstream Storage as a Service model combined with the Wipro Upstream Storage Reference Architecture ensures seamless delivery of an end to end solution.

2. A hybrid approach to address upstream storage challenges delivering business process optimization by combining business workflow management solutions with infrastructure optimization solutions.



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3. Wipro’s vendor neutrality will ensure an ever‐green storage solution utilizing best‐of‐breed technology, with the option to switch between technology providers enabled by our interoperable orchestration layer.

4. Wipro’s global capacity to deliver innovation across all layers of the storage architecture

5. Custom cloud, HPC and storage engineering services

6. Our ability to support cost efficiency drives through

a. A global support model integrated with Wipro’s global command center and ITIL framework

b. An openness to adopt flexible commercial models including consumption based pricing. c. Service performance that is measured and benchmarked against a set of metrics targeting

year on year improvement.

Thoughts for the Industry Transforming the storage architecture to cope with near exponential increases in data and the drive to reduce costs is a major transformational exercise across the enterprise requiring careful management of internal and external stakeholders. Storage solutions will require newer storage technology drawn from multiple vendors with the associated systems integration to build a comprehensive scalable service that is sensitive to organizations’ business process workflows. A collaborative effort is required to deliver the end to end solution in a transparent, reliable and consistent manner. While there are multiple technology and solution providers in the market, Wipro believes that the future of upstream data storage requires an end to end integrated service which is delivered through an intelligent orchestration layer overlying technology components. The systems integration must be driven from the contexts of technology and upstream domain knowledge to be successful. Based on our strengths and experience Wipro is positioned to be the service provider and system integrator of choice for this solution.

1. Non‐Linear and LEAN models provide innovation to manage the relentless increase in data volumes

2. The “Storage as a Service” model is the future and represents a business driven and outcome based, rather than an IT and technology driven, solution

3. Storage cost is no longer an exception for the ongoing/upcoming organization efficiency drives

4. People, process, technology and service are the key tenets of storage in the future, embracing innovation

5. Future storage solutions will not be viable if they do not deliver an improvement in user productivity and convenience

6. Change management and changed behaviors are key to the success of this initiative



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7. Storage as a Service enables the use of best‐of‐breed technologies to provide a fit for purpose scalable storage solution

8. A vendor neutral system integrator is required as the interface between customers and technologies to ensure the delivery of improvements.

References

1. Unleashing the Full Potential of Technology Initiatives: Our Whitepaper based on our experience and best practices derived from engaging with our global Energy clients[ Addresses the problems associated with the challenge of global deployment of new innovations and technologies ]

2. Eating the data Elephant: Our joint Whitepaper with Petris on upstream Data Management

Challenges[Addresses the challenges and assumptions made regarding upstream data which is the prime consumer of the storage discussed above]



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