Dubai-based Shelf Drilling selects Riverbed | Aternity to accelerate business critical applications

Riverbed | Aternity announced that Shelf Drilling, an offshore drilling company providing shallow water services to the oil and gas industry, has implemented its SaaS Accelerator and SteelHead solutions. This can help the drilling company eliminate bandwidth limitations associated with the VSAT links used to connect their offshore rigs to mission-critical on-premises and cloud-based systems.

By delivering a 95 per cent reduction to the company’s intranet traffic while optimising core applications by 80 per cent, the solution has helped Shelf Drilling streamline rig operations including order processing, staff training, and operations management.

Headquartered in Dubai, Shelf Drilling operates 30 rigs across eight countries and has 12 onshore locations, with approximately 3,000 employees and contractors.

“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,” explained Ian Clydesdale, IT director at Shelf Drilling. “As a result, some of our key applications require optimisation 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 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 rely 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.”

To address these challenges, Clydesdale and his IT team implemented Riverbed’s solutions which integrate with technologies such as Shelf Drilling’s VMware virtualisation software, JD Edwards, and Microsoft 365 to improve performance.

Riverbed | Aternity has enabled the company to achieve a compression rate of over 50 per cent on 1.2 terabytes of email data. Performance monitoring traffic is also accelerated at an average rate of 67 per cent per month, and for their ERP suite, the company experiences 81 per cent optimisation along with a 95 per cent reduction in database replication traffic.

Additionally, Riverbed | Aternity streamlines replication of data from offshore instances to the virtual cloud environment.

Commenting on the successful partnership between Shelf Drilling and his organisation, Mena Migally, regional vice president, META at Riverbed | Aternity said, “This was a landmark project as Shelf Drilling was the first organisation 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.”

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