CyrusOne's Energy Cloud Powered by Dell update from November 2012

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CyrusOne's Houston West data center, pictured above, is hosting an HPC cloud optimized for oil and gas companies. (Photo: CyrusOne)

Data center services provider CyrusOne, a subsidiary of Cincinnati Bell, has a very vertically-targeted cloud offering for oil and gas customers, which is housed in its Houston West colocation facility. The energy industry cloud is a high performance computing (HPC) solution powered by Dell and R systems, which  have formed a “project partner” alliance, offering customized HPC solutions for clients.

This is a combination of HPC in a cloud consumption model. “It was a natural progression in our support of the oil and gas industry to move from supporting traditional hardware and processing for the data intensive industry to enabling a cloud-based solution,” said Kevin Timmons, chief technology officer, CyrusOne.

Companies can rent out dedicated, secure computing resources for periods between one day and one year. The offering makes sense for companies with projects requiring HPC who don’t want to incur the CapEx of owning the intermittent compute muscle required. There’s also the advantage of having CyrusOne manage the HPC environment instead of the costly option of dedicating these resources in-house, with the goal of leaving more room for running a business instead of running a data center.

Optimized for Energy, But Available for Other Uses

CyrusOne wants to provide these energy industry customers with a solution that is fast to deploy, and easy to scale and align to different uses and business cycles. The company is specifically targeting oil and gas companies that typically need to analyze large amounts of geological data in quick fashion and financially sound manner in order to make decisions and go to market faster. However, the HPC cloud solution from Dell and R Systems can support any industry requiring complex computing. In addition to the targeted oil and gas industry, it can support finance, healthcare/life sciences, manufacturing and media.

“Customers who need immediate, high-performing computing solutions for shorter time frames can quickly realize revenue opportunities,” said Nnamdi Orakwue, vice president, Dell Cloud.

It’s all housed in a high power-density facility with 2N architecture, and deployed through CyrusOne’s "Sky for the Cloud" peering and interconnection platform. The infrastructure consists of a customized data hall designed for maximizing power usage effectiveness (PUE ) and peering within a single location. The platform provides customers with flexibility and options as to how to build out capacity, by choosing either CyrusOne’s bandwidth marketplace, Internet exchange platform, or a cross-connect to cloud services.

“Sky for the Cloud creates an ecosystem to efficiently facilitate the generation, analysis, and sharing of all the geophysical data locally and statewide,” said Timmons.

In August 2012, CyrusOne announced plans to expand its Houston West site.  Upon full completion, the facility will have more than 300,000 square feet of data center space, making it the oil and gas industry’s largest digital energy campus and a true geophysical center of seismic exploration computing. Later this year, the company is launching the first statewide Internet exchange in the country that will connect all CyrusOne facilities in Texas - including Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio.