The history of oil excavation goes back to 374 A.D. when workers in China drilled the first wells. And while oil drilling is an industry that goes back centuries, its adoption of technology has not been as rapid as other fields.

Halliburton Co., one of the largest providers of products and services in the energy industry, has teamed up with Dell EMC to change that by performing data analytics and providing cloud solutions through Halliburton’s Landmark business line.

“A lot of the customers that we talk to are still using a legacy client server environment, and this is something new to them,” said Andy Anglin (pictured), director of cloud technologies at Halliburton Landmark. “They don’t expect that they could take something and virtualize it somewhere else and get better performance than what they’re used to seeing on the front end.”

Anglin spoke with Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV) host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. They discussed how Halliburton uses various VMware Inc. products and potential new opportunities generated by recent enhancements for VxRail (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Advantages of hyperconverged

Halliburton’s work with the oil industry involves use of the Landmark Earth Appliance, which combines its software with VxRail. The resulting solution helps oil companies with operations in areas of the world where access to a public cloud is not always a viable option.

This is important because petrotechnical workloads often involve large amounts of data driven by graphics processing units, according to Anglin.

“Our customers are used to having these really massive powerful workstations with heavy GPUs in them,” Anglin explained. “But when you’re in a hyperconverged environment, your compute and your data are sitting right next to each other so we can significantly reduce the time to load that data.”

Dell announced several new enhancements on the VMware side of its business this week, including the launch of a hybrid cloud/on-premises service to enhance its VxRail systems. This will offer additional capabilities for Halliburton’s work within the oil industry.

“It gives us the opportunity to integrate that into our broader solution with the different cloud platforms,” said Anglin in assessing the latest VxRail news. “Now what we can do is layer on another management level. It creates some really cool opportunities.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Tech World 2019 event. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE