Workstations

The Right Workstation for Oil & Gas Professionals

by Ashok Pandey February 28, 2022 0 comments

The computing needs of professionals working in the oil and gas sector are very different from other sectors. Their application usage is different as O&G professional needs more computing and graphics capability. Choosing the right machine is not an easy task because the explorers and engineers from the sector need machines that offer both performance and reliability. It’s important to understand their unique requirements. Though business laptops are good, but what this sector’s professionals need are mobile workstations—machines that have been especially designed, optimized, tested and certified machines to power complex workflows.

Functional and Environmental Requirements

In the oil and gas workflows, you need a machine with the ability to interpret GIS data quickly and accurately. A workstation can quickly process, interpret, and analyze the data associated with your projects.

This industry also has one of the toughest environments for any PC/laptop. Here are some of those factors that your machine must be able to withstand:

Operating Temperature: In this industry, you might deal with heavy temperature swings, which will go below 0°C at one end and exceed 50°C at others. commercial PCs won’t even start in such extreme conditions, and in fact their components may also fail due temperature extremes.

Vibration/Shock and Dust: Professionals in this sector work around different types of machinery and subject to shocks and vibrations. This could damage moving parts like laptop fans and HDDs. When you are working in fields, dust and debris is also quite common, so you need a device that can withstand this harsh enviorenment . What you need is a MIL STD certified system that has undergone stringent testing

System Performance: You need to understand your performance requirement. If you are going to process data then it requires moderate processing power and huge storage. Whereas for doing machine learning kind of operation, you may require higher Compute power, AI accelerators, and larger storage drives.For GIS data you need higher professional graphics capability . Along with higher storage you need higher ram capability and suggested is 32GB or 64 GB Ram

Connectivity: You might require various ports to connect different devices such as PLCs, sensors, and cameras. You must get a workstation that comes with numerous I/O ports.

When you are at remote sites, you may not get wired connectivity. Using wireless connectivity such as 4G/5G LTE, you can get data connectivity all the time. You can also utilize Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to connect to local networks and sensors.

While multitasking, you might connect your PC to multiple screens, so you keep your eye on different processes. You require a PC with multiple DisplayPort or HDMI ports.

Cyber Security: You must ensure network and device security. According to a study by Deloitte, the risk for the most vulnerable and most severe cyber-attacks occurred in production environments. Even if you are in the safe connectivity zone, you need to have TPM (Trusted Platform Module) and firmware PTT (Platform Trust Technology) powered PC. These modules provide intrusion resistance at network endpoints where cyber-attacks are most common.

Conclusion

Being an oil and gas professional, you might require different computing power. You can rely on a workstation with a powerful configuration to cater to your computing needs and tested for MIL standards. You can check out the HP ZBook series of workstations powered with the latest 11th Gen Intel processors and NVIDIA Quadro graphics to handle heavy workloads. These workstations are certified for professional apps and can easily run apps simultaneously for multitasking.

Check out https://store.hp.com/in-en/default/hp-business-offers for some good deals by HP.