Oil & gas leader reduces costs, supports remote operations, and facilitates M&A with Nasuni
About Ithaca Energy
Ithaca Energy is a leading independent oil and gas company headquartered in Aberdeen. The company has production, development, and exploration operations in the UK North Sea, a diverse portfolio of offshore assets, and an onshore office. With a relentless focus on high performance, Ithaca Energy aims to deliver sustainable growth underpinned by operational excellence and financial discipline.The challenge
Ithaca Energy’s recent acquisition added a level of complexity.
Ithaca Energy’s growth strategy, including acquiring Chevron’s Central North Sea assets, led to a 250% increase in file data. The company’s reliance on outdated nightly backups to disks and tapes was costly, unreliable, and cumbersome. Before the acquisition, Ithaca Energy sought a modern solution to cut costs, protect and manage its data, improve collaboration, and streamline IT operations while supporting offshore activities and reducing risk.How Nasuni helped Ithaca Energy
Nasuni’s transforming Ithaca Energy’s data management with cost savings.
“We put together a cost model which included, amongst other things, hardware file storage, tape backups, and other products incurring annual maintenance fees,” explains Ithaca Energy’s IT Operations Manager Malcolm Brown. “When we analyzed the model, it was clear that the Nasuni subscription model offered us cost savings.”Azure allows for amplified data authenticity & infinite scale.
Active files are cached locally on virtual Nasuni Edge appliances, but all file data and metadata scales in cost-effective Azure blob storage. For Ithaca Energy, this means no more unplanned capacity upgrades, but there is an added benefit that Brown refers to as “data authenticity.” Although the files are cached locally, the gold or master copy of each file resides in the cloud, where the original and all the deltas are stored as immutable objects.Nasuni Edge allows for faster file recoveries.
“Nasuni offers excellent support and the faster file recovery that Nasuni provides ensures that we can make data available to any of our locations within 30 minutes, which is critical in helping maintain business continuity,” Brown says.Nasuni supports Ithaca Energy’s scalability by facilitating mergers and acquisitions.
Nasuni’s ability to quickly integrate acquisitions proved to be a strong selling point for the company. “Acquisition of an additional offshore asset does not present an issue – we are able to deploy Nasuni within 15 minutes, we can view and use that data across all our locations,” Brown says.Still, the Chevron North Sea Limited acquisition was a significant test. The transaction provided Brown and his team with significantly more data than expected. This was hugely valuable data and included seismic data, well data, logistics, CAD files, office projects, and more. Nasuni provided an easy way to quickly migrate data into Ithaca Energy’s primary cloud file repository – while giving users access to the same file system.
Nasuni delivers offshore file storage.
Nasuni is designed in part to be able to extend file services to any location, and Ithaca Energy has proved this by deploying a virtual appliance on an offshore drill rigNasuni ensures that Ithaca Energy can run lean remotely.
Demonstrating success offshore gives Brown and his team a model for future deployments. “We’ve now shown that we can run these offshore deployments in a production environment in a lean way,” he says. “We’ve proven that it works effectively in the offshore environment over a low bandwidth circuit with high latency.”Nasuni’s offering matches NetApp’s performance.
Initially, the company deployed a single Nasuni appliance to serve all its users, from office workers to geoscience experts relying on complex software. However, Brown has now deployed additional virtual appliances. After tuning, optimization, and testing, Brown and his team are delighted. “We are achieving increased digital performance using the Nasuni appliances,” Brown says.In oil and gas, we use very large data sets. We were always having to buy storage that would have to expand at some point in the future or be replaced completely, which was not a practical or cost-effective approach. Nasuni presented as a fit-for-purpose cloud solution that could replace traditional backup, it was clear that this was the solution we had been looking for.
The Nasuni difference
Nasuni provides Ithaca Energy unlimited file storage in Azure blob storage, built-in backup, disaster recovery, and local server performance. Since adopting Nasuni in 2018, Ithaca Energy has streamlined its file management processes, enabling seamless integration of acquisitions and efficient handling of large datasets like seismic and CAD files. With Nasuni’s cloud-native architecture, the company ensures secure, scalable, and cost-effective file storage while maintaining fast data access and business continuity across all locations.Next steps: VDI in the cloud & continued growth
The features of the Nasuni platform and cost efficiencies ensured that Nasuni would have an immediate impact, but Brown is also excited about the long-term potential. The company is steadily swapping local infrastructure in favor of VDI and has deployed a virtual appliance in Azure to serve VDI users. “Our people are able to access the same data sets that their colleagues are using in their new location,” he adds. “We are considering deploying more Nasuni appliances in Azure.” Overall, he adds, “Nasuni is a multi-scenario solution, not just local file storage, backups, or DR. It’s helping us look forward and future-proof.”
Industry: Oil & gas
File data platform: Nasuni
Object storage: Microsoft Azure blob storage
Use cases: File storage consolidation; storage/backup/DR to the cloud; M&A integration; cloud VDI; multi-site collaboration
Benefits: Significant cost savings; fast performance for power geoscience users; cloud VDI support, improved recoveries; unlimited capacity; faster M&A integration; simpler IT management