Fault tolerant undersea drilling system

Hydril has chosen the fault-tolerant eXtremeDB high availability in-memory embedded database system from McObject for a fault tolerant undersea drilling system

The Hydril Company is a leading manufacturer of connection and pressure-control products for the oil and gas industry: the fault-tolerant eXtremeDB High Availability (HA) in-memory embedded database system and its remote procedure call (RPC) implementation running on the QNX Neutrino realtime operating system (RTOS) has been chosen by Hydril for key data management and network communication roles in its new pressure control technology for oil and gas drilling.

In the Hydril pressure control systems, eXtremeDB-HA resides within controllers, collecting real-time machine and environmental data used to manage undersea pressure control equipment (the stack or "pod") and to optimise its safety and productivity.

These databases are replicated within each controller, to ensure availability in the event of application failure.

The entire pressure control system of database-enabled controllers is synched via eXtremeDB-HA utilising a dual redundant network and a standby pod.

In addition, the eXtremeDB Transaction Logging (TL) module provides an on-device data archiving feature for the undersea controllers in the event that archiving to the central enterprise database is interrupted.

This replication of vital system data, at multiple levels and with automatic fail-over, provides the highest degree of reliability for Hydril mission-critical pressure control application, said Eric Milne, the chief engineer of electrical and software engineering.

eXtremeDB also plays a critical network communication role in the new Hydril technology.

The database itself provides the core messaging system with its remote access interface, which enables controllers and software components to read from and write to eXtremeDB databases at every network node.

The QNX Neutrino RTOS built-in networking underlies the eXtremeDB-based communication, providing a secure transport layer for inter-process data exchange.

"By positioning eXtremeDB-HA as the origin and destination point of every message, the interface adds transactional capability to network communication, and this safeguards data integrity across the Hydril distributed system," McObject Chief Technology Officer Andrei Gorine said: "eXtremeDB-HA guarantees that whatever event happens on one controller, it absolutely gets reflected on all other parts of the system".

He credited QNX Transparent Distributed Processing (TDP) with simplifying the coordination of system nodes by enabling all network devices to recognise one another and share information in a peer-to-peer fashion, regardless of their location.

"QNX Neutrino and eXtremeDB form a very powerful combination for networked and distributed control applications, such as that used at Hydril," said Dave Curley, vice president of marketing at QNX Software Systems: "McObject has harnessed the power of our unique transparent distributed processing capabilities, delivering built-in redundancy and load balancing capabilities to Hydril's control nodes without the need for any special coding".

In earlier pressure control systems, Hydril used data management code developed by their engineers.

Milne said the adoption of the McObject commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) database "frees up development resources" and reduces QA in his department.

"Integrating a proven database system has helped us meet customer needs faster by reducing the development cycle," he said.

Because the eXtremeDB-HA can be easily extended by adding new indexes and tables, and because using a commercial database system naturally separates application logic from database logic, the new embedded software is expected to accommodate upgrades and new features more easily than before, Milne said.

"Customers are always adding new capabilities to their systems".

"They might want to integrate an existing system, or software that may be developed in the future".

"eXtremeDB-HA will greatly reduce the amount of code required to make such a change," he said.

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