Isilon Clustered Storage: Speeding Data Acquisition and Analysis for Oil and Gas Companies

Anyone close to the seismic industry is aware of the huge volumes of data now routinely recorded, manipulated and stored. Many companies now specialize in advanced data storage technologies, offering unprecedented levels of storage capacity combined with usability. The following promotional article highlights one such company’s offerings.

Upstream oil and gas exploration, production, and seismic data acquisition along with downstream management and delivery of that data is placing an enormous burden on traditional storage systems. This is most evident in 3-D and 4-D seismic imaging techniques that provide a better view of drilling locales — but often bring along huge datasets that can cause performance bottlenecks across the network.

Isilon IQ® clustered storage solutions are designed to meet these increasing storage demands while ensuring that datasets are highly accessible, protected and useful for business. Isilon’s award winning family of IQ clustered storage systems combines Isilon’s unique OneFS® operating system software with the latest advances in industry-standard hardware and a robust suite of clustered storage software applications to deliver modular, pay-as-you-grow, enterprise-class storage systems — enabling companies in the oil and gas industry to transform data into information, and information into breakthroughs.

Industry Leading Scalability for Seismic Data — up to 1.6 PB in a Single File System

New technology advancements used in the collection of seismic data for oil and gas exploration enable the creation of advanced 3-D and 4-D models. However, this unprecedented level of detail can quickly overwhelm legacy storage systems. Isilon IQ easily scales storage, unifying vital seismic data into one file system, increasing the performance of seismic applications, and reducing the time spent managing storage. Isilon IQ delivers industry leading scalability — up to 96 nodes in a single cluster and up to 1.6 petabytes in a single file system.

Powerful Performance — up to 10 GB/second

No matter whether it’s upstream seismic data or downstream ERP, Isilon IQ delivers instant, reliable and unfettered access to massive amounts of data while providing up to 10 GB/second of throughput. Isilon IQ can deliver 4 to 8 times more throughput than traditional storage systems, accelerating data access for multiple projects and multiple users and groups.

Unmatched Reliability

Isilon IQ ensures that data is always available, easily withstanding the loss of multiple disks or entire nodes without users losing any content. With Isilon, all files are striped across multiple nodes within a cluster, and no single node stores 100% of any file. If a node fails, all other nodes in the cluster still deliver 100% of the files without interruption — resulting in reliable data access for oil and gas companies of any size.

Easy to Use, Easy to Manage

One seismic survey can easily produce several terabytes of data. Isilon IQ clustered storage — a unique appliance platform with proprietary software — unifies vast libraries of seismic data into one easily scalable, easily accessible shared pool of data. Isilon IQ clustered storage dramatically reduces the time and resources required to manage data — allowing companies to refocus vital resources towards interpreting the data and delivering results to management, partners and customers. With Isilon IQ clustering, one person can now manage petabytes of data derived from seismic studies — representing an incredible leap in efficiency.

Easy To Grow, Easy To Own

The Isilon IQ clustered storage product line addresses the oil and gas industry’s full spectrum of storage needs — from the highest performance Tier-1 applications to Tier-2 enterprise archive, disk-to-disk backup and disaster recovery. Powered by OneFS, the Isilon IQ family of products creates a single pool of expandable storage that is easy to install and grow — once racked, a 10, 50 or 100+ terabyte cluster takes less than 10 minutes to configure and set up, and capacity can be added on the fly in less than 60 seconds with no downtime. Isilon IQ enables customers to maximize their budgets by easily expanding storage on a modular pay-as-you-grow basis.

Breakthroughs Begin With Isilon

The Isilon product line is comprised of the Isilon IQ 200, 1920, 3000, 6000, 9000 and 12000 platform nodes, the Isilon EX 6000, EX 9000, EX 12000 and Isilon IQ Accelerator extension nodes, and licensable software applications such as SyncIQ™, SnapshotIQ™, MigrationIQ™, SmartConnect™, SmartQuotas™ and Aspera for Isilon IQ. This set of flexible and innovative products define new industry standards by delivering a single file system that scales to 1.6 petabytes of capacity, up to 10 GB/second of throughput and supports high-performance InfiniBand® for lowlatency, high-bandwidth intracluster communication — providing companies in the oil and gas industry with the power to transform their critical digital assets into business breakthroughs.

“New technology advancements used in the collection of seismic data for oil and gas exploration have enabled the creation of advanced 3D and 4D models that have unprecedented levels of detail — a wealth of information that has overwhelmed our legacy storage systems. Isilon clustered storage has dramatically reduced the time and resources required to manage our data and has allowed us to refocus vital resources towards interpreting the data and delivering results to our management and partners.”

 

“In the ever-intensifying and expanding search to discover new, extractable sources of oil and gas, rapid and accurate analysis of seismic data is the key to gaining a competitive advantage in this high-stakes race and feeding massive consumer demand. In order to maximize the value of our vast library of seismic data and deliver the deepest and most accurate analysis possible to our customers, we require storage with unparalleled concurrent performance, ease of use, simplicity and scalability. Isilon IQ delivered as advertised.”

“We require highly scalable and reliable storage systems to store and analyze seismic data for our oil and gas customers. Isilon IQ clustered storage offers unsurpassed reliability, scalability and ease of use that enables us to perform our analysis more efficiently.”

For more information, please visit www.isilon.com. Isilon IQ clustered storage systems are available through PowerByte Solutions Inc. Founded in March of 1996, PowerByte Solutions is an industry leader, providing a broad spectrum of computer products and specialized services to the corporate, geophysical and oil & gas sector.

PowerByte Solutions partners with our customers, suppliers and manufacturers to provide the best Computer Technology Solutions to achieve Customers technology goals and optimize their investment. We are up to any customer challenge! The “Total Solution Concept” of complete system integration and superior service encompasses the sale, service and lease of Computer systems, Linux clusters, Isilon Clustered Storage, Disk & tape technologies, Enterprise Class solutions software, and Professional Services. Information about PowerByte Solutions can be found at www.powerbyte.com.