No matter the commodity price, the equipment that produces, moves and processes crude and natural gas must be maintained.

“Ongoing maintenance is critical,” said Jake Loosararian, co-founder and chief executive officer of Gecko Robotics, in a phone interview.

The Pittsburgh-based robotics company he co-founded in 2013 utilizes artificial intelligence-enabled robots to gather data on infrastructure, from pipes to pressure vessels, tanks to boilers and silos to help determine what could fail or is failing and assist with maintenance.

“We’ve created this proactive way of maintaining critically important – and expensive – infrastructure,” said Loosararian, 28

“The robot I made in college was to address things that, if they failed, could have a negative impact,” he said.

Doing such inspections traditionally put people in danger, he said. “As I was building my robot, someone fell off a scaffolding and died,” he said.

When Gecko Robotics first started, he said it focused on the power space. But since then it has expanded “a fair amount” to work with government agencies such as the U.S. Navy, manufacturing and oil and gas companies. He listed BP, Chevron, Exxon, Marathon and Shell as among the customers using the machines to inspect the integrity of their infrastructure. The company recently raised $40 million in seed money, with Mark Cuban as a backer.

“We build these machines and platforms to identify integrity and help with assessments related to issues with infrastructure and predicting when things will fail,” he said.

“We’ve found the best way to understand structural integrity, whether it’s pipes or pipelines, digesters, oilers, tanks or silos, the way to identify integrity is through going out to those places and do spot checks with sensors,” he said.

For example, the company has developed a tubing integrity inspector with sensors that can perform inspections safely and a lot faster.

Beyond that, Loosararian said the company does not merely sell a customer a robot but uses its software to analyze the masses of data provided by the robots and artificial intelligence to identify when failures will happen, such as a refinery explosion or pipeline failure.

“We don’t know when things will happen or if the steps we’re taking are effective. We take the masses of data collected by the robots and utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning to predict failures,” he said.

While the company’s oil and gas work has been focused on the midstream and downstream sectors, primarily downstream, Loosararian said Gecko Robotics is getting involved in the onshore and offshore upstream sectors.

“We’re still looking at how we can be most effective,” he said. “We’re starting with the traditional infrastructure – pipes, tanks, and potentially piping for drilling.”

When the industry regains its footing from the double whammy of historic demand destruction because of the COVID-19 pandemic and oversupply as producing nations seek market share, Loosararian predicted a renewed push toward adoption of automation. He said the industry will see it as a way to reduce the footprint at well sites and a way to inspect infrastructure quickly, safely and obtain much more information.

The downturn is pushing the industry to adopt automation much faster, he said, noting that the company is already getting more inquiries from the industry.

“If we can predict when things will fail before they do, our customers will have the biggest competitive advantage. We will be reducing shutdowns, help the environment and safety and also extend the life of very expensive equipment,” he said.

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Chicago – January 29, 2020 – Instana, the leading provider of automatic Application Performance Management (APM) solutions for microservice applications, today announced new capabilities for monitoring the VMware vSphere Suite, as well as applications running on vSphere infrastructure.

Known for the ability to correlate infrastructure and application performance metrics and deliver actionable information to all stakeholders from development to operations, Instana’s latest release includes the ability to discover, map and monitor components running on VMware’s vSphere suite. Like the other supported infrastructure components Instana supports, application performance metrics are analyzed along with the new vSphere metrics.

“As organizations evolve their application environment to leverage the latest advancements in application and infrastructure, it’s critical that their operational tools provide the broadest flexibility and intelligent analysis, regardless of the infrastructure chosen,” said Chris Farrell, Technical Director and APM Strategist at Instana. “The addition of vSphere support to our cloud, container, orchestration and microservice platform monitoring allows users to understand how different architectural and infrastructure choices impact overall service levels and application performance.”

The vSphere announcement continues Instana’s legacy of excellence in monitoring applications and their underlying infrastructure together. Whether organizations run hosts physically, virtually or in the cloud, Instana enables them to quickly and easily see exactly how applications are performing and how the infrastructure is impacting those applications. With the ability to trace distributed requests end-to-end, the ability to see any and every possible infrastructure stack provides a complete picture of performance to Instana users.

Unlike other APM solutions, Instana fully automates the entire lifecycle of application monitoring including application discovery and mapping, monitoring sensor and agent deployment, and application infrastructure health monitoring. Whenever an application or infrastructure change occurs within dynamic applications, Instana recognizes the change in real time, instantly adjusting its application service maps, monitoring thresholds and health dashboards.

“Application migration is one particular use case for which Instana’s broad infrastructure and architectural support are a perfect combination to add value,” continued Farrell. “Whether migrating from monolith to microservices, physical to virtual hosts, or private to hybrid clouds, Instana’s automated discovery and performance monitoring provides the absolute quickest way to capture and compare different deployment options.”

The vSphere support and monitoring capabilities are available today as part of Instana’s automated APM solution. Learn more about Instana and their application monitoring solution at https://instana.com.

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Australia’s data centres are concentrated in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, but that is starting to change as storage and cloud providers and their customers see the advantages of situating them in regional Australia.
For example, Australian-owned cloud, data centre and connectivity provider iseek is set to open a data centre in Townsville shortly.

Founder and managing director Jason Gomersall says the decision to build in Townsville was prompted by a number of local organisations wanting to have a data centre nearby.

“In theory it doesn’t matter where it is but we’re finding government organisations in particular, and also corporates, are starting to care more and more about where their data is hosted and who it’s hosted with,” Gomersall says. “It’s just the security of knowing where it is and who’s got it.”
Regional data centres can also boost the resilience of Australia’s data by boosting the geographic area over which it is spread, he says.

“The internet as such was designed to distribute information globally and does that very efficiently and effectively. Then ironically we go and then concentrate all our data in one geographic location. It seems a little bit counterintuitive to me.

“From a policy perspective, I think the government should be looking at how they sort of spread the data centre load around the nation.”

Developing skills

Gomersall says the cost of connecting regional data centres to capital cities had been an impediment in the past, but this is now being addressed with better infrastructure.

Regional data centres can also play a significant role in local job creation and keeping and developing IT skills in the regions.

In the short term the Townsville data centre will create a handful of jobs but iseek is already starting to consider how it will expand that workforce. Data centres also create indirect jobs, such as the cloud services and hosted services within them.

“If we take a five to 10-year view on this – and when you build a data centre you’re taking a 20 year-plus view – I see significant job creation,” Gomersall says.

“We’re going to create the skills and do the training to build those skills in those areas.”

Joe Craparotta, vice-president secure power at Schneider Electric, says improvements in Australia’s telecommunications infrastructure outside the major carriers has made regional data centres more feasible while the rising cost of land in capital cities has made them more desirable.

Another advantage of housing them in cooler climates such as Toowoomba, where the $40 million Pulse Data Centre supported by Schneider Electric, Telstra and the Queensland government opened last year, is they draw on less power to keep cool.

“The running cost of the data centre can be a lot more efficient and a lot more optimised than a metro data centre,” Craparotta says. “There’s almost free cooling for a big chunk of the year.”

Close to power source

Additionally, they can often have access to good power, being close to the source of generation.

Craparotta says keeping IT skills in the regions will become more important as regional Australia becomes more digital and the use of the internet of things increases, creating further benefits for local industry.

“They have a facility locally they can rely on to help them digitise, either their farm – from paddock to plate – or the local university or school, or just the local businesses in general.”

While he is not suggesting that regional data centres will replace metro data centres, he does expect Australia will have a mix of both.

“I would expect it to be aligned with the population, so I would expect that there’s more regional data centres that are built over the next five years to accommodate the third of the population that is outside metro area,” Craparotta says.

“I’d predict in the next two to three years, we will see a much faster acceleration as the 35 per cent of Australia that lives outside the metro areas becomes more digital and more reliant on those services.”

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