Shell on the way to a hybrid cloud

The IT department of Shell, the large-scale concern on search and oil and gas production, acts as the consecutive supporter of transition to model of a hybrid cloud. According to this concept one part of applications works in a public cloud, and another in private, unrolled based on corporate IT infrastructure. According to Keyur Gadzharaval (Kayoor Gajarawala), the general manager of Shell Information Technology who is responsible for implementation of this strategy, the company still should do a long way.

The project started in 2010, as of the beginning of 2012 already brought many benefits, but so far Gadzharavala calls the achieved results no more, than an additional possibility of use of cloud services, than full-scale transformation of IT infrastructure. In particular, in 2011 Shell made cloud services available to several hundred of the company of developers and testers of applications occupied in the state. Work for which it was necessary to spend weeks earlier is executed during the working day now.

In 2010 IT department of Shell Oil came up against a funny situation when at the giant of the fuel and energy industry expenses on energy consumption began to grow at the amazing rates. In nine months volumes of the consumed energy of three key global and 400 regional DPCs reached 3.6 MW. Need of further accumulation of computing powers, on the one hand, and selection of additional power quotas, inseparably linked with it, with another, just were also an incitement for making decision on transition to use of cloud computing.

Shell started creation of infrastructure using VPC Amazon service (Virtual Private Cloud). It gave an opportunity to the company within Amazon Web Services (AWS) to unroll the isolated virtual private cloud. For the company whose state totals 150 thousand employees in 90 countries of the world, it at the same time means of cost reduction on energy consumption and increases in flexibility of delivery of IT services taking into account requirements planning of corporate users.

Recently Shell together with NR developed supersensitive sensors of seismic activity which help the company to detect oil in the wells which were considered devastated and to conduct developments in the places which were earlier considered as unsuitable for oil production. New sensors generate huge volumes of geological information, for example, at a stage of tests the value of the received data arrays reached petabyte. The company is going to place sensors approximately to 10 thousand wells, but the total volume of its storages does not exceed 46 PB. In the long term the next 10 years IT department of Shell there is a difficult and ambitious task to learn to process effectively in a cloud huge information flows and to take benefits for business from implementation of new sensors.