10 Days. 10 Stories. Part 1–2010
The very first fieldcloud engagement was for an oil & gas brownfield project offshore Angola. Talk about jumping off the deep end! Literally.
Offshore survival training is pretty crazy. The most fun part of the programme is the HUET, or Helicopter Underwater Escape Training. You learn how to hold your breath, stay calm and break out of ditched helicopter that has flipped over underwater. I had to do my training in the middle of winter in Marseille, the water temperature was only 6ºC.
We designed a solution for ‘lights out’ management of new downhole data acquisition systems installed on an unmanned, remote production platform. The systems were configured to automatically deliver sensor data over a satellite connection to a onshore application stack, hosted inside the client’s on-premise datacenter.
10 years ago, everything was PC-based running good old Windows desktop software intended to be operated locally. So we added IP-KVM and IP-PDU units to the 19" rack cabinet. The client needed to ensure that the field systems could be maintained from their HQ in Luanda, without sending personnel offshore unless absolutely necessary.
It was a lot of fun dragging crate loads of gear from supply boats, through a drilling rig and onto a rusty old 1980s vintage production platform. The best was fitting out the 19" rack cabinet and bringing up the systems in a confined space!
Meanwhile back in town we had a bunch of physical servers to deploy — it was a pretty heavy footprint with Oracle relational databases, WITSML decoding frontends and thick PC client applications for gas lift optimization analytics.
One of the challenges we faced was a requirement to extract data from legacy process control and SCADA systems on the platform. I had previous experience with old automation gear (mainly Westinghouse & Motorola RTUs) but this was the first time I saw a real April SMC 600 in action. We had to hack an interface together using a current loop RS232 converter and a Modbus TCP/serial RTU gateway. The experience was sort of like a crazy mashup episode of MacGyver teaming up with Indiana Jones. 😉
Logistics is always a fun part of an offshore project, involving boats, helicopters, drilling rigs and platforms. Transferring personnel during crew rotation between a supply boat and an accommodation platform is quite an ordeal, especially when using a FROG that holds only 9 people at a time!
Some excellent lessons were learned in Angola and the experience got us thinking about how to design more compact systems for automated data delivery between the field and client headquarters. During the second half of 2010, we sketched out a new architecture which led to the next chapter of our story.
Our major client at the time approved a new product development project at the end of 2010, based on the concept architecture we helped them specify. This led to the next chapter — how fieldcloud created our first edge computing gateway appliance product.
10 Days. 10 Stories. A special feature celebrating fieldcloud’s adventure over the last decade and how we became the company we are today.
