Oil and Gas

Energy exploration is an expensive and highly competitive business. Considering that 70 percent of the planet is covered by ocean, pinpointing those geographic locations which will be optimal for producing the most oil is akin to finding a needle in a haystack.

Working with data collected from receivers dropped to the ocean floor, exploration companies rank prospects for finding oil, reducing the risk of financial loss from dry holes. Raw data from images taken from the seabed is turned into 3 and 4-dimensional models—strong indicators of what lies below the surface. Processing these models can be very demanding in terms of computational resources because there are several millions of unknowns to solve per iteration. Often multiple iterations are needed, requiring tens to hundreds of terabytes of large and small files to be generated and processed. The accuracy, timeliness and cost of the resulting prediction can translate directly into significant profit or loss for energy companies.

Challenges

• Storage systems and compute clusters supporting seismic applications must be able to store and retrieve data in a massively parallel fashion. Seismic computing workloads are generally characterized by a high number of sequential reads of images that can be up to several terabytes each, which can constrain I/O. A product designed to support the demands of concurrent access to large files can tremendously increase the pace at which geologists and geophysicists retrieve and analyze multi-terabyte data sets, resulting in faster and more accurate drilling decisions.

• While technological advances in seismic processing and electromagnetic imaging, interpretation and visualization techniques have exponentially increased the demand for storage, traditional networked storage solutions have been unable to scale to the capacity levels necessary to store such large data sets.

IBRIX Fusion is ideally suited for the intensive processing requirements and demanding workloads that advanced applications require. Its unsurpassed support of high transaction rates can open the I/O floodgates, allowing processors to be fully utilized. Its flexible architecture enables IT to easily build large repositories by adding capacity and components on demand without outages. Open and modular in nature, IBRIX Fusion can be scaled for any size installation to maximize capital investments and ensure on-time project completion.

 When we embarked on building a new cluster, the decision whether to continue using IBRIX Fusion as our file serving solution of choice was clear. Since 2005 IBRIX has demonstrated terrific performance in our high volume cluster and, most importantly, we have stable connections from all the nodes, enabling our always-on environment.
IT Manager
Electromagnetic Geoservices ASA

IBRIX Fusion software enables fast, scalable access to data in real-time so Oil and Gas companies can:

• Increase application performance
• Maximize processing utilization and storage hardware
• Create a scalable digital asset online archive at low, single-digit cost per gigabyte
• Simplify management while maximizing flexibilityScale storage capacity and performance as needs grow, without forklift upgrades and downtime