National Oilwell Varco Achieves DR Assurance With SteelEye

SteelEye Technology, Inc. and Nordicmind Ltd, SteelEye’s competence and support center for Northern Europe, announced the implementation of SteelEye Protection Suite for SQL Server for National Oilwell Varco’s Falcon System, the world’s largest system integrating information flow and monitoring with oil drilling processes. SteelEye protects the Falcon System’s 148 Windows servers and applications across 74 oil rigs in the Indian Ocean.

 
A leader in the design, manufacture and sale of equipment and components used in oil and gas drilling, production operations, provisioning of oilfield services, and supply chain integration services, Norway-based NOV designs and delivers the Falcon System to cater to the upstream oil and gas industry. SteelEye’s comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery solutions ensure the functionality and high availability of the Falcon System in the event of sudden failures or interruptions, which could otherwise cause significant financial and productivity losses.
 
“The Falcon System enables expert personnel in the support centers to follow the drilling processes in real time by receiving graphs, charts and figures on the screen. In that way, they can keep up with the temperature, pressure, etc. The system works almost as a data hub for the drilling process,” said Richard Steffenson, Falcon´s project manager for NOV.

”Planned or unplanned downtime can result in prolonged outages and costs unacceptable in today’s global economy,” said Bob Williamson, executive vice president of marketing for SteelEye. ”Oil and gas companies worldwide depend on NOV for its ability to deliver a broad range of high quality oilfield products and services. With SteelEye Protection Suite for SQL Server, NOV and its customers can be assured of continuous monitoring of applications to minimize downtime regardless of the type of failure.”
 
NOV selected SteelEye after careful evaluation and testing. Nordicmind provided the local expertise and services for planning and developing the system in accordance to the selection criteria. In the test environment, NOV observed SteelEye Protection Suite for SQL Server in action and considered it a flexible and robust solution, and easily scalable for deployment in larger environments.
 
”NOV’s selection of SteelEye solutions to protect its Falcon System reflects a technical superiority, and is also a testament to the expertise of our personnel. In addition to the Indian Ocean installation, similar Falcon Systems are also planned for the protection of oil rigs in the North Sea,” said Marko Lehtimaki, director of business development for Nordicmind.