For many, the idea of working remotely simply means working away from one’s desk or office. For individuals in the oil and gas industry, working remotely can mean being onsite to study the earth’s subsurface in a remote corner of the world. However, technology is enabling access to critical data such as remote 3-D visualization images, which allows a mobile workforce to view the latest subsurface images—wherever they may be. Technology is allowing more efficient and cost-effective workflows in the oil and gas industry.

Imagine sitting at a desk in Houston and being able to access geological data from India that can accurately predict hydrocarbon deposits while maintaining compliance with international laws. This type of a mobile upstream workforce is changing the industry. The challenge is that an upstream IT environment is significantly different from a traditional IT environment. The upstream environment can require hundreds of different applications with a complex mix of integrated operations needs that can include both sequential and random data access, extremely large file sizes and regulatory requirements.

Moving data to visualization workstations outside of a data center is a difficult process as network connections lack the necessary bandwidth for real-time operations and workflows span organizational boundaries. Until now, remote visualization solutions have been complicated to deploy and manage and have not provided the quality or responsiveness that users expect.

NetApp, along with Cisco, Citrix and NVIDIA, developed the FlexPod Datacenter with Citrix XenDesktop and NVIDIA GRID. This infrastructure addresses the need for secure remote 3-D access to geology and geophysics (G&G) applications and data for geographically dispersed cross-disciplinary teams to improve collaboration and accelerate decision-making. Its key components include:
• FlexPod, a data center solution from NetApp and Cisco that scales to support growing workload demands without impacting performance;
• Citrix XenDesktop, which can deliver applications and desktops as secure mobile services to improve mobility and provide greater security for intellectual property with centralized control. XenDesktop with HDX 3D Pro can deliver a native, touch-enabled experience that is optimized for the type of device as well as the network; and
• NVIDIA GRID technology, for offloading graphics processing from the CPU to the GPU in virtualized environments. NVIDIA GRID vGPU allows multiple users to access the graphics processing power of a single GPU to share GPU resources and broaden the reach of visualization.

FlexPod Datacenter with Citrix XenDesktop and NVIDIA GRID has been tested with G&G applications and datasets from companies such as Schlumberger, Halliburton Landmark and Paradigm to ensure that the solution will work seamlessly with the necessary applications.

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