Riverbed | Aternity recently had announced that Shelf Drilling, an offshore drilling firm that offers out shallow water services to the oil & gas sector and has successfully implemented the Riverbed® SaaS Accelerator and Riverbed® SteelHead™ to overcome the inherent bandwidth limitations of the VSAT links used to connect its off-shore rigs to mission-critical on-premises and cloud-based applications.
Headquartered in Dubai, Shelf Drilling operates 30 rigs across eight countries and has 12 onshore locations, with approximately 3,000 employees and contractors. While technology plays a fundamental role in operations, the company’s offshore rigs present unique IT challenges.
As per Shelf Drilling reports, this solution has offered the firm to deliver 95% curbing on the firm’s Intranet traffic while optimizing core applications by 80% thereby aiding in streamlining critical rig operations comprising of the order processing, staff training, and operations management.
Shelf Drilling is headquartered in Dubai and operates 30 rigs across eight nations and has 12 onshore locations, with approximately 3,000 employees and contractors. While technology plays a vital role in operations, the firm’s offshore rigs present unique IT challenges.
According to the Riverbed | Aternity announcement, the firm is able to accomplish a compression rate of over 50% on 1.2 terabytes of email data. Performance monitoring traffic is also accelerated at an average rate of 67% per month, and for their ERP suite, the company experiences 81% optimization along with a 95% reduction in database replication traffic. Additionally, Riverbed | Aternity streamlines the replication of data from offshore instances to the virtual cloud environment.
Ian Clydesdale, IT Director at Shelf Drilling explained: “As satellite links are the primary means of connectivity, these rigs typically have low bandwidth of just 1-2 Mbps and high latency of up to 750 milliseconds. Adding further, Ian stated, As a result, some of our key applications require optimization to manage data replication effectively, including our JD Edwards ERP platform, responsible for generating purchase orders in the procurement process, as well as our operational management applications.”
Clydesdale further added: “Additionally, all the usual administrative functions need to share and access large files especially during key rig operations. Also, employee satisfaction is another aspect that’s heavily dependent on connectivity. Our staff now relies on bandwidth-intensive applications to keep in touch with family and carry out personal functions such as mobile banking. It’s imperative for us to facilitate this.”
For addressing out these hurdles, Clydesdale and his IT team implemented Riverbed SaaS Accelerator to accelerate business-critical SaaS applications and Riverbed SteelHead™ for WAN Optimization to maximize network and application performance. These solutions integrate with key technologies such as Shelf Drilling’s VMware virtualization software, JD Edwards, and Microsoft 365 to improve performance.
Mena Migally, Regional Vice President, META at Riverbed | Aternity Commenting on the successful partnership between Shelf Drilling and his organization stated: “This was a landmark project as Shelf Drilling was the first organization in the Middle East to implement our SaaS Acceleration solution. We take pride in providing them with technologies that are virtually ‘invisible’ – requiring minimal resources from their internal IT team – and thereby affording them the ability to focus on revenue generation and value creation for their end customers. As they now look to adopt a cloud-first strategy, Riverbed | Aternity is ready to actively guide them through their exciting transformation journey.”
Since Riverbed | Aternity began optimizing Shelf Drilling\’s Internet traffic, outages are now less likely to affect data transfer. This is key to the company’s cloud-first strategy which includes the migration to Microsoft Azure in the UAE. “Riverbed | Aternity is an integral part of our infrastructure, so when we’re considering new technology solutions, we have to prioritize technologies that integrate directly with it,” said Clydesdale. “We’re always striving for the best possible digital experience for our teams, and it simply doesn’t make sense to run a network of our size and complexity without Riverbed | Aternity’s optimization and SaaS Acceleration solutions.”
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