Last week CyrusOne, Dell, and R Systems launched an HPC cloud solution designed to meet the needs of oil and gas companies. The new service is being housed in CyrusOne’s “Sky for the Cloud” platform at its West Houston-based colocation facility.
The oil and gas space has long relied on HPC to analyze geological data in order to enhance operational decisions aimed at increasing time to market and improving profitability.
In a November 16 press release, CyrusOne Chief technology Officer Kevin Timmons noted that “Sky for the Cloud creates an ecosystem to efficiently facilitate the generation, analysis, and sharing of all the geophysical data locally and statewide.”
As with other cloud systems, the promised benefits are reduced capital and operational expenditures and the ability to easily scale to meet times of peak demand. The cloud model also frees up resources to be spent on the company’s main business drivers.
“We see the combination of HPC and cloud technologies as an incredibly powerful solution with tremendous customer benefit,” reported Nnamdi Orakwue, vice president of Dell Cloud. “Customers who need immediate, high-performing computing solutions for shorter time frames can quickly realize revenue opportunities. Dell continues to invest in cloud enabling solutions to help our customers achieve faster business results.”
Dell and R Systems are operating under a “project partner” alliance to offer their cloud service for both short and longer-term contracts that span anywhere from one day to one year. They say that the CyrusOne datacenter will help them achieve a high degree of performance, reliability and availability. Sky for the Cloud was designed for optimum power usage effectiveness (PUE) and the facility’s 2N architecture is said to enable the highest degree of power redundancy.
Although the HPC cloud will initially focus on the needs of the oil and gas industry, the partners plan to support complex workloads from other industries as well, such as finance, healthcare, life sciences, manufacturing and media.