An estimate of around 2.5 quintillion bytes of datawas produced globally in a day in 2018. With the wider adoption of the internet of things, this has grown at a higher speed ever since. Around 90% of the data we have today was generated in the past 2 years. The Oil & Gas industry is going to be a major generator of field data. As the oil and gas industry is embracing the technological disruptions caused by I4.0, it is expected to facilitate a gigantic build-up of data, especially from the industrial assets like sensors in oil fields and other interconnected devices.

With such a surge in data accumulation, oil and gas industries need to level up their IT resources and have to opt for various cloud services. In this context, data migration services is playing an important role, the topic of this blog.

What is Data Migration?

Data migration is a process of transferring data from one location, format or an application to another. This is usually performed at the enterprise level for moving the data to the cloud. It is an imperative and quite hectic process usually handled by the data management service providers.

Business Benefits of Data Migration

Data is one of the stepping stones that drives the success of any business, irrespective of the industry they belong to. For the oil and gas industry, in particular, the real-time, accurate data from interconnected devices like sensors and actuators play a crucial role. In this scenario, when most of the oil and gas companies are either on their way or are already using the digital resources, data migration comes out as an imperative step.

The exploration and production (E&P) data that is accumulated over years have long been stored in warehouses or on-premise services. However, as the industry progresses towards digitization, the present data migration has become the need of the hour. We have listed out some of the business benefits of data migration, for the oil and gas sector:

Ensures data integrity

Data migration services often focus on maintaining data integrity. Moving data to an upgraded system with well-planned data migration services ensure the business’s continuity, by carefully securing data integrity.

Lowers storage costs

Migrating to data centers may have initial costs but is sure to save you from storage costs in the long run. It reduces the cost of maintenance of storage, training costs, etc. Also with efficient data migration, unwanted or uncleaned data can be filtered out, making room for more space on the server(s). Thus giving you more storage space with lesser costs.

Improves Flexibility

Leveraging the expertise of data migration service providers allows minimal disruptions to your business operations. Your team can essentially focus on creating better plans to improve your business.

Scalable Resources

Migrating data to an advanced platform helps you to upgrade and leverage industry-specific applications. This makes your business at par with the latest digitally-driven technological advancements, improving overall efficiency.

Better Data Back-Up

Data migration to a cloud-based or hybrid platform gives your business better backup options. You need not worry about losing data over server failure, as you will always have a data backup.

Improves Overall Productivity

With automation technologies seeping into the realm of data migration services, it helps businesses to boost their productivity. Optimized technology due to the upgraded data centers improves overall operation time and enhances the efficiency of the system.

Data quality in the Oil & Gas industry

What remains constant is the need for quality and reliable data that facilitates accurate and timely decisions especially for the oil and gas industry, where safety and environmental stakes depend on the data-based decisions.

Therefore oil and gas companies need to give due importance to data management. Maintaining data quality throughout the process is one of the challenges in implementing an efficient data management plan.

Some of the key elements of data to be qualified as quality data in the oil and gas industry are listed here.

• Data must be truthful. It must reflect the realities of the market and the required conditions.
• Data must be complete in every sense. There must not be any trailing data and ambiguity.
• Data must be consistent. The data set values and related nomenclature must be uniform across the data set to ensure data values in one data set are in alignment with those of another data set.
• Data must be up to date. It must be accurate concerning the time-related changes.

Data Migration Challenges in the Oil and Gas Industry

Lack of expertise, proper planning, and data governance culminates in a poorly managed data migration which can ultimately create losses for the company. Also in the case of large migration, many companies lack access to data preparation software and skills. Many do not have the budget to hire a specialist firm to get assistance.

Data automation helps companies to overcome these challenges. The emergence of big data and data analytics, data migration services, and data integration services, has played a crucial role in catalyzing digital transformation for the O&G industry.

Big data in tandem with cloud computing also reap the best fruits of digital transformation that empower companies to embrace I4.0 with full vigor. Together with these technological advancements data migration services help companies in extracting quality data and map them easily to the target source.

Conclusion

Industry 4.0 is the future that O&G companies like any other industries must gear up for. With growing data demands, data migration services from experts at Utthunga help companies deploy the best data migration and data integration practices.

The introduction of DevOps has changed the role of the quality assurance (QA) team. Earlier, the role of QA was all about functional testing and regression after a product is deployed. The DevOps approach focuses on automating the entire process in software development to achieve speed and agility. It also includes automating the testing process and configuring it to run automatically.

Automated software testing is an integral part of the entire DevOps process and helps achieve speed and agility. This reduces human intervention in the testing process as automation frameworks and tools are used to write test scripts.

Agile Environment

It has additionally been seen that under agile conditions, the quantity of tests keeps on expanding dramatically across every iteration, and an automation software would proficiently deal with it and guarantee early admittance to the market.

Besides, under Agile, automated functional testing guarantee the product performs rapidly and precisely according to the prerequisites.

DevOps environment

Automation tools play a significant part in accomplishing the execution of CI/CD/CT. DevOps accepts a culture shift; it breaks data silos to build, test, and deploy applications to achieve quality product with decreased deployment times. Accordingly, test automation is without a doubt the key to the achievement of DevOps.

How does Test Automation fit in DevOps?

Under DevOps system, the manual testing occurring in corresponding with the code development does the trick the Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD) and Continuous Testing (CT) measure. The organizations face a ton of difficulties, for example, time limitations for development and test cycles, testing on different devices, applications and programs, equal testing, and much more. Hence, the most productive approach to parallel testing of software in DevOps systems is to embrace a well-integrated and strong test automation arrangement.

Use automated test cases to detect bugs, save time and reduce the time-to-market of the product. Here are the benefits of including test automation in DevOps:

• Minimize the chance of human error as a software program does the test
• Handle the repetitive process where you need to execute test cases several times.
• Automatically increase reliability.

 

Backdrop of Communication Protocols in Industries

 

The IT and OT layers of the automation pyramid execute two different types of real-time operations, i.e., soft real-time communications and hard real-time communications, respectively. The soft real-time communications mostly take place across the IT applications horizontally and vertically across MES, ERP, cloud, and control systems. On the other hand, hard real-time communications take place horizontally across machines, and vertically among controllers, and SCADA/HMIs.

 

While soft real-time operations can bear the latency of 10 to 50 milliseconds, most hard real-time operations can get severely impacted if the latency is more than 1 millisecond. Motion control applications are usually hard real-time bound and usual network errors like indeterminism, jitter, high latency, and bandwidth can severely impact the throughput.

 

Imagine a robotic arm that is moving items on a conveyer belt and passing to the next station for further processing, must be highly precise and accurate in terms of its timings. A delay of a fraction of seconds can damage the items or break the operation continuity.

 

This clearly underlines the demands of cutting-edge machines, i.e., speed, precision, and determinism. At present, Fieldbus and Ethernet are the two majorly used networking technologies on plant floors. With continuous updates in Ethernet standards, it is also becoming gradually popular for OT layer operations.

Challenges in Existing Networking

There have been several communication technologies that have emerged for field level, but Ethernet and Fieldbus protocols are most widely adopted across industries. However, despite several periodic upgrades, the industrial plant floor experiences the following challenges:

 

• Latency: The Generation 1 industrial networking technologies like RS 232 & RS 485, SERCOS, DeviceNet, etc., were able to support data transfer over long distances. However, the rate of data transfer was very low, i.e., approximately 1 Mbit/sec. To overcome this, Ethernet with an established physical layer became the primary choice for industries. Gradually the Generation 2 networking technologies started emerging with Ethernet PHYs such as Profibus with PROFINET, Modbus with Modbus TCP, CC-Link with CC-Link IE, etc. However, even with many standards, Ethernet is still unable to address the latency and determinism needs of the industrial networks. Although, PROFINET IRT offers the same deterministic capabilities that is expected for hard real-time operations. However, a precise timing model is necessary to plan the traffic slices. Unfortunately, the latency in standard Ethernet can be assured up to a certain extent due to its store and forward strategy.
• Jitter: One of the biggest challenges that industrial motion control applications face is certainly not the slow speed of the connectivity. It is rather the jitter. Jitter can be understood as the variance in latency. Sadly, the data transmission over TCP, IP, or UDP necessarily exhibits jitter. Due to the lack of traffic prioritizing and slicing ability, the varying latency interferes with the plant floor operations to a great extent, especially when the operations are time-critical.
• Implementation Complexities: The Generation 1 industrial networking technologies had different physical layers, which did not allow them to share common wiring across heterogeneous networks. Subsequently, the Generation 2 network solutions used common Ethernet PHY, but proprietary layer 2 implementations still cannot allow them to be transmitted over the same cable. This is a serious installation complexity for a plant floor with variants of machines and devices supporting multiple vendors. This is an ideal case of manufacturer lock-in as it forces the industrial plants to be confined with selected vendor(s).

 

As opposed to top layer application requirements, plant floor requires the network connectivity to have ultra-low latency, fixed jitter, and deterministic capabilities. These necessities call for a networking standard that not only allows the connectivity to be time-sensitive, but also spans across all the layers of the automation pyramid.

 

What is Time-Sensitive Network (TSN)?

 

Ethernet is one of the most preferred networking technologies for top layers of the network. However, it is gradually becoming the right choice for the factory settings also. The way to resolve the common issues present in standard and industrial Ethernet is to introduce new networking standards in the Layer II of the OSI model. These brand-new standards are combinedly termed as Time Sensitive Network, abbreviated as TSN.

 

TSN is an extension of Audio Video Bridging technology (a set of standards that allows high-quality streaming of audio and video signals over standard Ethernet). The IEEE 802.1 TSN Task Group developed the TSN standard, which can solve all the challenges that were present in standard and industrial Ethernet. A few of many standards in the TSN specification that can connect the automation pyramid in a single thread are:

 

• IEEE 802.1AS: A mechanism that synchronizes the messages and delays of all the nodes in the network by keeping them identical to the clock of the Grandmaster node, called Grandmaster Clock. The Grandmaster is selected using an algorithm called Best Master Clock Algorithm (BMCA). The BMCA is responsible for broadcasting the time and measuring the delays to maintain the schedule.
• IEEE 802.1 Qbv: A standard that schedules the traffic based on the time shared by the grandmaster node. 802.1Qbv defines a mechanism to control the flow of queued messages through the TSN switches. This ensures that only the scheduled messages are released in those time windows. The non-scheduled traffic is blocked, which thereby enables the delays from each switch to be deterministic.
• IEEE 802.1Qbu: This standard interrupts the large low-priority Ethernet frames in order to transmit high-priority traffic. Post this it resumes sending the remaining part of the large frame without impacting or losing previously transmitted data.
• Other Standards: Some of the other standards that define various features of TSN are:

 

802.1CB	Frame Replication and Elimination (FRER) adds fault-tolerance to the network
802.1Qca	Explicit path control, bandwidth and stream reservation, redundancy (protection or restoration) for data flows
802.1Qcc	Offline/online configuration of TSN network scheduling
802.1Qci	A policing and filtering standard that mitigates the risk of incorrect node functions
802.1Qch	Defines traffic for forwarding queued traffic
IEEE 802.1Qcr	Provides bounded latency and jitter

 

 

 

Migrating to a TSN-based Ethernet network will require special hardware features like PTP protocol (Precision Time Protocol) to synchronize the network clock and PHY/MAC to modulate/demodulate and send/receive the signals. Determinism in motion control applications can be brought through specific protocols like EtherCAT, Profinet IRT, and EtherNet/IP among others.

 

Why TSN for Motion Control Applications?

 

TSN comes with the strength to revamp motion control applications. It does so by enabling the factories to cope with the long-standing issues of incompatibility among the machines, absolute real-time deterministic communication, and much more. Take a look.

 

• Scalability: TSN will proliferate the use of Standard Ethernet across the automation pyramid. This will allow factories to utilize the existing top layer network settings for the field layer as well. This also implies that adding new machines/devices will be easier without having to worry about the vendors and make. Therefore, one network the from field layer to the top layer.
• Interoperability: TSN eliminates the persistent issue of incompatibility among the motion control devices and applications by allowing the Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) networking technologies to be implemented on top of the Data Link Layer of the OSI model. Not only this, with Ethernet’s backward compatibility, device engineers will be able to incorporate TSN in their networks without having to worry about obsolescence encouraging improved interoperability among old and new machines/devices.
• Greater Scope for IIoT: With the ability to classify the bandwidth for time-critical and non-critical message queues, TSN allows the same network to be used for various motion control and other applications. This also simplifies networking across OT and IT layers allowing a smoother communication model between the machines on the plant and the client applications at the IT layer. Therefore, improved scope for IIoT.
• Lower Maintenance Cost: With one standard technology across the communication hierarchy, the complexity of maintaining two separate technologies in IT and OT layers is eliminated. This further leads to lesser cables and hardware, thereby incurring lesser maintenance cost.

 

Footnote

 

The growing importance of real-time data accessibility for time-critical motion control applications has pushed the protocol associations to create their adaptation of TSN. TSN will definitely enable multiple protocols to be implemented on top to deliver cutting-edge solutions. Utthunga is renowned for having a tremendous success rate in delivering best in-class solutions. Our product engineering capabilities span across all the layers of the automation hierarchy. Our motion control services extend over hardware and firmware development, application development, obsolescence management, Value Analysis and Value Engineering, lifecycle management, validation and verification, pre-compliance and certification support, and a lot more.

 

Check out our motion control services here!

 

 

Improving customer service. Safeguarding customer satisfaction. Winning customer loyalty. Increasing service revenue. Augmenting aftersales turnover.

These are some of the primary goals that machine builders have been pursuing. But, how many have been able to meet these goals? Unfortunately, not many, owing to the machine visibility challenges arising out of lack of meaningful data flow from the commissioned device/equipment.

Nevertheless, this will not be the case going forward. Yes, you heard it right! IIoT is the magic wand that has provided a 180-degree spin to the situation.

Wondering how? Let’s comprehend by considering the present reactive customer service model as a case in point.

Whenever there is a machine breakdown or performance issue, the client logs in a compliant with the corresponding machine builder. The OEM’s service representative responds to the service request by collecting data about the issue — via email, telephone, or chat — and scheduling an engineer visit. The engineer will visit the client’s location, provide a resolution, and close the service ticket. All in all, a lengthy process with avenues for delays and disruptions, which can hamper customer satisfaction across many fronts.

IIoT turns this situation upside down.

By enabling machine builders to seamlessly connect their equipment/machine with intelligent sensors that can transfer real-time data, IIoT provides end-to-end connectivity and visibility, which was unheard of in the industry. This means that machine builders no longer have to wait for an issue to appear. They can proactively monitor the performance of the machines spread across geographies in real-time and spot any discrepancies. This gives them an edge to identify potential equipment issues before they occur and proactively reach out to the customer to provide service.

The end result: Better customer service, which will lead to greater customer satisfaction, increased loyalty, and improved service revenue.

The benefits don’t end here. IIoT-based proactive customer service also helps strengthen the relationship between the machine builder and their customers by creating an ongoing relationship; one that allows machine builders to proactively perform maintenance, while keeping device uptime high (for the customer) and minimizing service costs (for the machine builder). Thus creating a win-win situation that will augment aftersales revenue.

The Tip of the Ice-berg

Apart from supporting proactive customer service, IIoT also helps machine builders to:

What Reports and Studies Say?

• IIoT-based predictive maintenance solutions are expected to reduce factory equipment maintenance costs by 40% – Deloitte
• Using IIoT insights for manufacturing process optimization can lead to 20% higher product count from the same production line – IBM
• There is potential to increase asset availability by 5-15%, and reduce maintenance costs by 18-25% using predictive maintenance tied to IIoT – McKinsey

Accelerate R&D

By creating an information value loop from the end machines (commissioned machines at the client’s location) to the engineers, IIoT can significantly shorten the time between an issue surfacing in the field and fixing the issue in production (even before either the client or the competitor realizes it). In the process, it can accelerate the product design cycle and reduce time-to-market, which will give an edge to the machine builder with regard to the competition.

Efficient Inventory Management

IIoT empowers machine builders to effectively track the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of the commissioned machine along with its components. Based on these insights, they can proactively procure spare parts and efficiently manage the inventory.

Improve Operational Efficiency

Using advanced analytical and machine learning capabilities, IIoT supports faster identification of issues in operations & functions, and facilitates quicker resolutions (even before there is downtime). The result: A multifold increase in operational efficiency.

Making Multiple Revenue Streams a Reality!

What was once a dream, is now a reality! You no longer have to rely on one source of revenue —machine sales — for survival. Unlock untapped revenue streams across maintenance and support space using IIoT.

Start your IIoT journey now using Utthunga assistance. We are an industry leader with extensive experience in facilitating the creation of a truly connected IIoT ecosystem with real-time data transfer and analytics capabilities.