Managed Services Oil and Gas

WellView™ to AWS Cloud AppStream Conversion for Oil Company

2 min read

Feb 10, 2022 6:39:57 AM

“Upstream” is the segment of the oil and natural gas industry that is responsible for finding and producing crude oil and natural gas and also includes associated activities such as drilling wells, trucking supplies, and mining oil sands. One large upstream energy company engaged Sparkhound to modernize its legacy IT infrastructure to support continued growth.

Challenge

Outdated IT Infrastructure Throttled Continued Growth

Many of these upstream organizations have multiple offices distributed across the globe, each running their own servers, databases, and applications. Companies in these upstream industries often have on-prem, legacy infrastructure because certain software takes added expertise to scale through the cloud. Such is the case with this particular upstream oil company and their WellView™ application.

The WellView database stores information related to all aspects of the oilwell lifecycle including information collecting, analyzing, monitoring, and reporting. This upstream oil company was using six physical sites with their own individual Test and Development instances of WellView. Each location included multiple SQL servers and frontends servers for a total of 85 servers and 10 WellView instances.

Solution

Implement AWS Cloud AppStream Conversion to Support Scalability and Global Accessibility

Sparkhound recommended consolidating the physical WellView environment into a fully-managed application streaming service from Amazon called AppStream.

The oil company’s AWS cloud migration project entailed reexamining its legacy processes with the goal of lowering IT costs and creating more agility via AppStream. Working side-by-side with the company’s DBAs and WellView application owners, Sparkhound overcame the hesitations by laying out a major, detailed digital transformation plan into the AWS cloud while tagging, monitoring and measuring WellView’s new cloud streaming process to all associated desktops.

Leveraging AppStream, the oil company was able to fully scale and stream WellView in the AWS cloud to all user desktops—in every office—without acquiring, provisioning and adding additional operating hardware. By doing this, the oil company was able to consolidate 85 SQL servers down to 15 and one instance.

Transformation

Cloud Migration Reduces IT Costs and Creates More Agility

With Sparkhound’s skilled assistance, the upstream oil company simplified their WellView application delivery by consolidating their on-prem hardware, enabling them to stream the application from cloud. The benefits of the WellView cloud migration soon became apparent as the company was able to downsize its physical IT infrastructure by 70% while realizing faster application performance and the redundancies inherently built into the AWS cloud.