Interpret More Seismic Data in Less Time
BlueArc storage solutions deliver the performance and advanced data management features to meet the challenges of today’s data-intensive oil and gas exploration activities and strict project deadlines.
A storage solution that can help accelerate discovery in oil and gas exploration must have several important characteristics. These characteristics include:
- High Performance: In order to keep today’s HPC clusters satiated, a storage solution must offer high data throughput and high I/O performance. Storage must also be able to accommodate a large number of simultaneous reads against the same stored dataset as calculations are distributed across hundreds of servers, and delivered performance must remain consistent as the number of reads, systems, and file sizes scale.
- Massive Scalability: New seismic imaging techniques can produce datasets that run into hundreds of terabytes each, often multiple petabytes in aggregate. Whether it’s for the data acquisition, processing, or interpretation phase, any storage platform has to scale easily to accommodate the rapidly growing data sets.
- Reduced Cost of Ownership: A storage solution must be able to consolidate petabytes of data onto a single platform with a common set of management tools. The use of industry standard protocols increases interoperability and choice, while lowering costs. And the solution must be energy efficient to help rein in power consumption costs.
- Multiple OS Support: The richer set of data produced by today’s exploration equipment is frequently examined and interpreted using many different applications running on a variety of operating systems, including Unix, Linux, and Windows. As such, a storage solution must support standard protocols and accommodate applications running on all operating systems, even when they’re accessing the same dataset.
- High Availability and Data Protection: Beyond performance, the other major potential storage bottleneck is downtime, which can add days, or even weeks to the discovery process. To avoid downtime, storage solutions must offer a full set of high availability features such as redundant components and paths, multiple RAID levels, and cluster failover across multiple nodes.
