Pacific Drilling digs SAP HANA with SUSE Linux on AWS

With one of the newest and most technologically advanced fleets in the world, Pacific Drilling has grown into a successful, premium drilling contractor. Its stateof-the-art, high-specification drillships benefit from a proven design and highly developed construction technologies. The company currently has nearly 1000 employees at locations that range from the corporate offices in Houston, TX, to branch offices in Brazil, Nigeria, and Luxembourg.

Like any company in the oil and natural gas industries, Pacific Drilling cannot control the price of the natural resources it helps to harvest. One of the ways that Pacific Drilling Company sought to reduce operating costs was to reduce the cost of its existing IT infrastructure, particularly its SAP infrastructure.

With the help of SUSE partner Protera Technologies Pacific Drilling migrated its entire SAP estate to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS).  Due to this migration Pacific Drilling will save roughly $1 million over three years, or to put it another way, 50% of TCO with 200% of HANA capacity.

Pacific Drilling has received the coveted SAP HANA Innovation Award at Sapphire 2017 for this successful project. Special shout-out for Protera Technologies, who made this migration happen (Protera Technologies case study here). And last but not least, SUSE success story here.