Longtime customer Sentinel Peak Resources (SPR) is an upstream oil and gas company responsible for heavy oil development and extraction. The company owns and operates several sites throughout California, with most located in the Central Valley area.
Prior to this project, EA conducted an audit of all SPR’s SCADA-related assets and developed a master plan for the next steps in the evolution of their system. During the audit, EA and SPR identified obsolete software and operating systems that manufacturers no longer supported. The audit also revealed potential risks in reliability, opportunities to add redundancy, and the need to standardize the programming to ease equipment maintenance and staff training. As part of EA’s master plan, this project would address these issues through a platform upgrade of four Central Valley sites.
To update the SCADA systems for these sites, EA first completed a platform replacement. By replacing the underlying computing and network infrastructure with the latest version of AVEVA System Platform software, the system became more robust, reliable, and supported.
EA installed thirty Dell servers running over 100 new VMWare virtual machines with the latest available Windows operating systems and upgraded the AVEVA SCADA software to the latest version. Engineers installed over 80 new Moxa Ethernet network switches, along with new server racks, air conditioning units, power supplies, and power protection units.
There was no acceptable downtime in bringing the new system online, so EA completed the installations virtually, in parallel with the existing system. Key stakeholders from Sentinel Peak Resources had an opportunity to view and verify the functionality before the new system was brought online. This solid foundation gave Sentinel Peak Resources’ internal staff the confidence to perform equipment maintenance and update the software and security patches. It also offered the ability for future expansion of the SCADA assets.
