CASE STUDY | LEGACY RESERVES
INCREASED
PRODUCTIVITY WITH
ENHANCED
WORK-LIFE BALANCE
Implementing VDI powered by NVIDIA GRID™
and VMware Horizon is giving the employees
at Legacy Reserves the freedom and flexibility
they need to work more effectively.
NVIDIA GRID provides a high-performance
platform for running the highly specialized oil
and gas applications used by Legacy Reserves
while increasing employee flexibility.
AT A GLANCE
CUSTOMER PROFILE
Company: Legacy Reserves
Industry: Oil and gas
Location: Midland, Texas
Size: 360 employees and contractors
SUMMARY
> Oil and gas company focusing on
acquiring and developing oil and
natural gas properties.
> Previous Virtual Desktop
Infrastructure was unable to run
many of the applications that the
company needs for its day-to-day
work.
> Experimenting with NVIDIA GRID
yielded such good results that the
company is implementing virtual
desktops for every eligible user.
> Employee productivity and work-life
balance have been enhanced.
SOFTWARE
Hypervisor: VMware vSphere
Desktop and Application Remoting:
VMware Horizon View
Key Applications: Spatial Energy Petra,
TRC Consultants PHDWin, Lufkin
Industries SROD, ESRI ArcGIS, and
Google Earth
HARDWARE
NVIDIA GRID Boards: K1
Servers: Cisco UCS C240
Clients: Various desktop, mobile, thin,
and zero clients
Legacy Reserves LP is a master limited partnership headquartered in
Midland, Texas, that focuses on acquiring and developing oil and natural
gas properties primarily located in the Permian Basin, Mid-Continent,
and Rocky Mountain regions of the United States. Their primary
business objective is to generate stable cash flows from long-lived oil
and natural gas properties, thereby supporting and increasing quarterly
cash distributions per unit over time. Since 2006, Legacy Reserves has
acquired 128 producing properties for approximately $1.6 billion.
CHALLENGE
Legacy Reserves relies on several highly specialized, graphics-intensive
industry applications, such as Spatial Energy Petra, TRC Consultants
PHDWin, Lufkin Industries SROD, ESRI ArcGIS, and Google Earth. The
geographic diversity of their operations means that users often require
part-time remote access to applications and data, such as when
traveling or if an immediate response is required after hours. In
response, Legacy Reserves decided to explore implementing a Virtual
Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) three years ago.
Rollout began one and a half years ago to users across the company
from Accounting to Geology, Land, and Business Development.
Deployment began with a pilot that slowly expanded to cover additional
users. The implementation consisted of an SSL VPN that allowed users
to remotely access their office workstations using an RDP connection.
“We proceeded very slowly to allow ourselves plenty of time to resolve
problems as they occurred,” said Corey Elliot, Director of Information
Technology at Legacy Reserves. “Our previous VDI implementation was
plagued by slow performance and rendering issues, because RDP does
not support OpenGL and DirectX. For example, getting Google Earth to
work in this environment was possible, provided that the virtualization
was correctly set up; however, we still saw rendering problems, such as
half the world missing or seeing only the outlines of states and nations.
Users also experienced significant lag and other usability issues.”
CASE STUDY | LEGACY RESERVES | INCREASED PRODUCTIVITY WITH ENHANCED WORK-LIFE BALANCE
Our previous VDI
implementation was plagued
by slow performance and
rendering issues, because
RDP does not support
OpenGL and DirectX. For
example, getting Google
Earth to work in this
environment was possible,
provided that the
virtualization was correctly
set up; however, we still saw
rendering problems, such as
half the world missing or
seeing only the outlines of
states and nations. Users
also experienced significant
lag and other usability
issues.
Corey Elliot
Director of Information
Technology
Legacy Reserves
“From an IT perspective, some of the drivers behind moving to a Virtual
Desktop Infrastructure include data security, simplified management
and support, and less need to keep expensive equipment waiting around
for new people joining the company,” added Adam St. Louis, Technology
Service Analyst at Legacy Reserves. “Provisioning a workstation for a
new hire could take days. We knew that successfully implementing a
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure could solve a lot of these challenges, and
we are very fortunate that the company gives us the freedom—and
budget—for R&D so that we could explore a viable long-term solution.”
SOLUTION
As the IT department kept searching for ways to improve performance,
someone researching an issue happened to see an ad for NVIDIA GRID
technology. Legacy Reserves already used and trusted NVIDIA cards in
their workstations, and migrating to NVIDIA GRID held the promise of
resolving the long-standing challenges with the current deployment.
The K1 cards went into existing servers, and the installation proceeded
smoothly. Getting users to try the new implementation was another
matter. Users typically did everything they could to avoid making the
switch and only then gave it a reluctant try. Unlike the previous
implementation, NVIDIA GRID delivered full workstation performance
that rivaled the highest-end workstations at Legacy Reserves. The initial
skepticism quickly vanished once users tried the new implementation.
Legacy Reserves is currently building out a new datacenter in Odessa,
Texas. They purchased three new Cisco UCS C240 rack-mounted servers
equipped with a single NVIDIA GRID K1 card per server. VMware vSphere
and Horizon View provide the hypervisor and desktop remoting, and
users receive pooled Windows desktops. Storage is provided by an allflash array for maximum throughput. The previous implementation had
taken three years to reach this point; however, the new GRID-enabled
CASE STUDY | LEGACY RESERVES | INCREASED PRODUCTIVITY WITH ENHANCED WORK-LIFE BALANCE
5 REASONS FOR GRID
1 Users receive performance on par
with high-end workstations from
office and remote locations.
2 Personnel can respond more quickly
to incidents at any time because they
don’t need to come into the office.
3 IT management has been greatly
simplified and streamlined compared
to supporting and maintaining
individual workstations.
4 Centralized storage enhances data
security.
5 Employees enjoy greater flexibility
and work-life balance, which is
helping them be more productive.
NVIDIA GRID technology is
giving our people the
performance they need to do
their jobs more flexibly and
effectively than ever before,
and is also making it easier
for us to maintain data
security and overall control
over our network. It’s taken
us three years to get to this
point, and the wait has been
well worth it.
Corey Elliot
Director of Information
Technology
Legacy Reserves
implementation proceeded from concept to deployment in less than 90
days.
“We set up the servers, made sure everything was stable, and started
pushing out virtual desktops,” continued St. Louis. “We didn’t see any
advantage to providing individual desktops, and therefore decided to pool
desktops by department to keep troubleshooting and management as
simple as possible. We got a little push back from folks who didn’t like
being unable to personalize their desktops, but it was pretty minor, and
the overall reputation of our Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is improving
steadily. As of now, we have about 90-100 full-time virtual desktop
users, with another 50 or using it on a part-time basis.”
RESULTS
Legacy Reserves places a premium on work-life balance. Employee
productivity is increasing as the VDI deployment spreads, and so is the
ability to offer flexibility in when and how people work. Oil and gas is a
24x7 undertaking, and employees are sometimes called to respond to
various events at off hours. Before NVIDIA GRID technology, such a call
often required the employee to report to the office and log into their
workstation. Today, a user can simply access a virtual desktop and
resolve the problem from home, thereby avoiding the disruption of
having to leave home.
“We still have some people using laptops with local applications, but
even they are starting to use the new implementation even more than
working on those devices,” Elliot continued. “Instead, they open up View
and log into a virtual desktop from home, hotel, and even when they are
in the office. The virtual environment gives them a central place to store
and access the files and data they need, and the graphics performance is
at least as good as their devices can provide, if not better. We’ve even
seen some people visiting sites like YouTube for a few minutes here and
there, and we think that’s fantastic, because it proves that the new
technology has become seamless for our users.”
“New hires who are able to use the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
receive a thin or zero client and are up and running within minutes,”
explained St. Louis. “Meanwhile, we’re not taking good machines away
CASE STUDY | LEGACY RESERVES | INCREASED PRODUCTIVITY WITH ENHANCED WORK-LIFE BALANCE
from existing users, but we will start phasing out older and slower
workstations as the Odessa datacenter comes online. This will also help
with future mergers and acquisitions, since adding new users is so fast
and easy.”
IT management has been greatly simplified. Provisioning desktops for
users now takes only a few minutes instead of hours, and there is no
longer a need to keep workstations waiting for new hires. The overall
volume of service calls has held steady; however, IT can troubleshoot
problems directly, instead of having to visit the user to access a
workstation or attempt to remotely guide the user through
troubleshooting steps. At worst, the user can simply log off and receive a
completely new virtual desktop almost instantly.
Legacy Reserves has dedicated circuits running from the datacenter to
remote locations in a hub-and-spoke arrangement that allows nearlocal performance when accessing a virtual desktop and is helping drive
user adoption at those locations. The current setup can accommodate
50-75 more users, and Legacy Reserves plans to expand the NVIDIA
GRID deployment in about 6-12 months, once the new datacenter is fully
operational.
“Right now, the only outliers are people working deep in the field with no
connectivity and people wanting BYOD support,” concluded Elliot. “We
are slowly moving in that direction, but for now, anybody who wants to
install Horizon View on their personal machine and get it working is
welcome to do so. Overall, we haven’t seen any direct cost savings yet,
but the indirect benefits are invaluable. NVIDIA GRID technology is giving
our people the performance they need to do their jobs more flexibly and
effectively than ever before, and is also making it easier for us to
maintain data security and overall control over our network. It’s taken us
three years to get to this point, and the wait has been well worth it.”
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