As the result of a network storage overhaul, efficiency at Newfield Exploration extends from the IT department to remote geoscientists.

In just a dozen years Newfield Exploration has grown from a promising upstart to one of the world's leading independent crude oil and gas exploration and production companies. Now consistently ranked among the top 12 operators in the Gulf of Mexico in terms of daily gross operated production volumes, Newfield has seen 6 straight years of 25% and greater compound annual growth rate in both reserves and production. And the aggressive Newfield team has no intention of slowing down. The company expects to continue its climb up the rankings via a growth strategy that balances acquisitions with drilling opportunities. Essential to this approach is a commitment to applying - across the organization, from the drilling platform to the data center - the best technology available, while preserving an independent's low cost structure and mindset.

Mark Spicer, information technology (IT) manager at Newfield, joined the company 2 years ago when the user community already was clamoring for more storage capacity and better performance. The existing computer environment had evolved to include a complex mix of systems, all configured with direct attached storage. Unfortunately, such a structure was cumbersome to manage, difficult to expand and in many cases frustratingly unstable. "It was not unusual for us to have to reboot servers twice a day," said Spicer. "We had about three terabytes (TB) of storage scattered across Windows NT systems, UNIX servers and Novell servers. To accommodate our aggressive growth, I knew we had to find a storage solution that was simpler to scale and more cost-effective to manage.

"In the process, however, I also knew that our user community of 200-plus was not willing to sacrifice any performance, particularly on the technical side."

With a background in petroleum and geological engineering and experience in both operational and IT units, Spicer was familiar with storage solutions and looked to networked storage provider Network Appliance to play a key role in the IT infrastructure. "NetApp filers are widely utilized in the oil and gas industry as good storage solutions for seismic interpretation applications," he said. "But when we began exploring the idea of making the NetApp system the central data storage solution for the entire company, we had more than a few skeptics."

Spicer and his team saw an opportunity to give Newfield's commercial users the same class of performance that was the norm on the technical side, where high-end seismic and other 3-D visualization applications drive requirements.

"Also part of our checklist was a solution that could deliver on transparent network file system and common Internet file system access, an essential requirement in our vision for integrating our heterogeneous environment," Spicer said. "Many of our users were concerned that sharing storage would degrade performance. But we felt by configuring the filer with high-speed networking connections and setting up volumes to precisely match access requirements, we could deploy a very responsive structure."
The Newfield IT staff deployed an enterprise-class filer in the Houston headquarters in the fall of 2001 and immediately began moving business data shares onto the system. Now, more than a year since the transition, Spicer said that he has company-wide, high-speed data access with the cost advantages of centrally managed network storage. Technical users have the speed essential to seismic applications, and commercial users are experiencing unprecedented responsiveness.

Users also boast a new level of self-sufficiency. With backup and recovery technologies, users can save significant time in the process of recovering from data corruption or errors. They simply access a backup directory and select an earlier copy of the file they were working on. "It's significantly faster than trying to restore from tape, and more importantly, we've empowered them; they don't have to come to IT every time there's a problem," Spicer said.

And the original skeptics? "Today we have only converts," Spicer noted. "We have calculated that it takes no more than an eighth of a person to manage the filer that now has more than 250 users accessing it. Administrators finally have time to focus on higher-level, business-critical issues. And we've had no complaints from users on either side. Surprisingly, we've even had compliments."

Production proof

On the financial front, by deploying a reliable storage solution, the company has been able to experience dramatic savings in both capital and maintenance costs. For one thing, Newfield carries no maintenance on most of its NT servers. With all data resident on the storage device, Newfield can take advantage of lower-cost server configurations. "It's not economically justifiable to even carry maintenance," said Spicer. "Our servers have really become commodity items. Most systems are minimally configured with just the operating system and the applications, and they come with a 2-year warranty. If we have a system crash, it's quick and easy to unplug the failed server from the network and plug in a new one. We can replace an Oracle server in just about 15 minutes. When we had RAID arrays configured, it would have taken days to move data over to a standby system and get back up and running."

The infrastructure also enables greater flexibility for employees. Citrix MetaFrame for UNIX software allows thin-client users with DSL or cable modems to access Landmark applications from their home offices.

Geographically separated users can also use a common directory on the system to share files across UNIX and Windows systems. Spicer said this solution has helped Newfield continue to reduce IT costs to a current average of 12 cents per net equivalent barrel (IT $.12/bble).

Spicer said, "We may ultimately consider a redundant filer in Houston and use mirroring technology to back up across the wide area network to our storage system in Tulsa for site disaster protection. For now, however, 4-hour maintenance, redundant fiber channel drives and controllers, and the inherent reliability of the storage system have all added up to a highly stable structure."

Flexibility and growth

A centralized data storage solution ensures long-term flexibility. "We can more quickly integrate IT functions during corporate acquisitions, for example," said Spicer. "We must have a structure that can expand at a moment's notice. This system lets business drive our technology. Users choose systems and applications they need to get their jobs done. They don't have to worry that IT will stand in their way, saying that we need to retool our structure. We can add more UNIX applications or more Windows programs or double our data. None of those changes impacts our back-end infrastructure at all. With a centralized storage solution, our IT architecture won't hit a dead end in 5 or 6 years. All we'll need in the future will be more electricity and enough rack space for additional filers."