Gear6 Solution Brief: Energy and Exploration

Introduction

The oil and gas industry has an extreme need for compute and storage horsepower. Modern 3D seismic exploration applications produces terabytes of data requiring timely processing, analysis and interpretation in order to make costly drill or no-drill decisions. Given the cost of capital equipment tied up in exploration and drilling activity, it is imperative that these decisions be made expeditiously with a high degree of accuracy. Therefore seismic data processing, visualization and hydraulic flow analysis applications place extreme demands on compute and storage infrastructures.

The Challenges

With the proliferation of large compute clusters, adequate computing horsepower has been harnessed to tackle the computational needs of the upstream activities of the oil and gas industry, however, the disk storage infrastructure has not kept up.

• Excessive administration and tuning just to maintain minimum uptime thresholds
• Forced to add capacity to compensate for limited throughput (IOPs)
• Scalability limitations as energy applications require massive amounts of data and I/O throughput far exceeding the capability of a single disk-based storage server
• Missed project schedules and potential for lost revenue

Gear6 Solution for Energy and Exploration

Gear6 addresses this widening I/O performance gap between compute and storage resources with centralized storage caching, an innovative approach that complements existing storage infrastructure with high performance caching appliances. The many benefits of centralized storage caching include:

• Blazing I/O response times – data served from cache in microseconds compared to milliseconds from disk
• Appliance design fits seamlessly into file-based storage infrastructures without requiring a change of existing storage servers or clients
• Complement scalable computer farms with a caching solution capable of serving data in parallel to hundreds or thousands of storage clients over standard Gigabit Ethernet
• Read-only workloads for data processing, simulation and analysis applications are easily accelerated through caching
• Centralized caching complements your existing primary disk-based storage infrastructure by lowering maintenance costs, and increasing overall uptime of the storage and computing system
• Gear6 solutions make use of intelligent caching to minimize or eliminate reconfiguration. Once installed, no setup or teardown is required to instantly shift between processing jobs

Related Links:

• GX Technology Selects Gear6 Scalable Caching Appliances to Accelerate Seismic Imaging Applications