Challenge: Manage 200% to 300% annual growth and meet intensive per- formance requirements in a geologic modeling and seismic interpretation application environment. Solution: Accelerate system performance and improve staff productivity with NetApp® FAS6000 and FAS3000 series storage systems with Intel® Xeon® processors plus NetApp Flash Cache.

1. Success Story
Apache Corporation
Accelerates Gas Exploration
with NetApp and Intel
Another NetApp
solution delivered with:
Customer Profile of new operating regions. In 2010,
KEY HIGHLIGHTS
Headquartered in Houston, Texas, Apache produced 240 million barrels
Industry Apache Corporation is an independent of oil equivalent, added 827 million
Oil and Gas energy company that explores for, devel- barrels, and had more than $11 billion
ops, and produces natural gas, crude in assets. To keep pace with growth,
The Challenge oil, and natural gas liquids. The company Apache leverages the latest technology
Manage 200% to 300% annual has assets totaling $43.4 billion, to help maximize asset values and
growth and meet intensive per- 47.5 million acres, and approximately empower employees with critical
formance requirements in a 4,450 employees. Apache’s asset port- decision-making tools.
geologic modeling and seismic folio stretches across the world, from
interpretation application With corporate and exploration data
the United States, where its operations
environment. having grown to an astounding 13PB,
are in the Anadarko and Permian basins
Apache must maintain an IT infrastruc-
The Solution and in and along the Gulf of Mexico
ture that supports its changing, intense
Accelerate system performance and in the areas on and off the shore
operational requirements. The company’s
and improve staff productivity of Texas and Louisiana; to Canada,
success depends on quick access to
with NetApp® FAS6000 and Egypt’s Western Desert, and the United
large volumes of reliable seismic and
FAS3000 series storage systems Kingdom’s sector of the North Sea.
interpretation data. In addition, Apache
with Intel® Xeon® processors Since its beginning, in 1954, Apache
spends millions of dollars to secure
plus NetApp Flash Cache. has become one of the world’s top
drilling rights in a particular region
independent oil and gas exploration
and, to mitigate the associated financial
Benefits and production companies.
risk, must give its staff ready access to
The Challenge highly accurate information about ideal
additional head count
Fast access to large volumes drilling locations.
of exploration data
66% power savings, and Apache staff members use the
59% space savings with Apache is on a steep growth trajectory,
Schlumberger Petrel 2011 “seismic-
Flash Cache on SATA drives having experienced 200% to 300%
to-simulation” application for effective
annual growth in recent years through
evaluation of potential oil and gas
to large data volumes exploration and development successes,
discovery sites. In all business-critical
acquisitions that enhance critical mass
Apache application environments,
in core areas, and the establishment
high performance is vital.

2. “The combination of the Intel Xeon processors in
the NetApp FAS6280 system along with NetApp
Flash Cache allows us to take full advantage of
powerful exploration and production applications
unhampered by storage bottlenecks for enhanced
decision making.”
Bradley Lauritsen
Director of Exploration Applications, Apache Corporation
“Our system-performance demands NetApp and Intel together offer Apache system along with NetApp Flash Cache
have continued to increase,” says the advantage of network convergence allows us to take full advantage of
Bradley Lauritsen, director of Exploration and multiprotocol support. NetApp FAS powerful exploration and production
Applications at Apache. “Each new storage systems support the efficient applications unhampered by storage
version of critical software adds more Server Message Block 2.0 (SMB2) file- bottlenecks.”
functionality, but also increases our sharing protocol, which is imperative for
performance demands. To leverage Apache’s 64-bit Microsoft® Windows® 7 To reduce administrative overhead
advanced technologies for 3-D seismic compute environments and the 10GbE amid rapidly expanding data volumes,
interpretation, reservoir simulation, and connections among desktops, servers, Apache uses NetApp OnCommand™
other important activities, we needed a and storage systems. SMB2 delivers as Operations Manager. The software
storage solution that could match our much as 100% performance gains in delivers comprehensive monitoring and
intensive computing, file-sharing, and loading data into systems across the management from a central console
network performance requirements.” 10GbE network. and allows the IT staff to track perfor-
mance metrics and utilization statistics.
The Solution NetApp Flash Cache is also essential NetApp FlexClone® technology is used
Leveraging performance-enhancing to helping the company optimize per- to efficiently replicate data volumes and
technologies formance across its entire environment. reduce storage requirements in Apache’s
Apache deployed a NetApp storage Flash Cache speeds access to oil and developing and testing environment,
environment that scales quickly and gas data through intelligent caching for while NetApp deduplication technology
easily and offers several important random read-intensive workloads. increases storage efficiency by as much
performance advantages. NetApp Multiple 512GB Flash Cache cards as 53% in the production environment.
FAS6280 and FAS6080 storage systems in the NetApp FAS6000 and FAS3000
series storage systems improve storage NetApp storage is fundamental to
at primary and secondary data centers
efficiency and, by using Flash Cache Apache’s global disaster recovery
provide the production environment for
with SATA drives, reduce Apache’s IT and data protection strategy. NetApp
Apache, with FAS3270 and FAS3170
costs. Lauritsen notes that the cost per SnapMirror ® technology replicates
storage systems supporting other
terabyte is 52% lower with Flash Cache compressed data from Apache’s
operational areas. The NetApp
on SATA drives and offers 66% power Houston and remote sites to a
FAS6000 and FAS3000 series storage
savings and 59% space savings. managed hosting facility where
systems with Data ONTAP® 8.0 software
Apache maintains six months’ worth
feature the Intel Xeon processor. With
“Since deploying the NetApp FAS6280 of backup copies. After the data is
Intel Inside®, Apache benefits from an
storage system, we’ve noticed significant replicated, SnapVault® technology
increased amount of processing power
performance improvements,” says transfers incremental data changes,
on a per-server basis.
Lauritsen. “The combination of the Intel reducing bandwidth requirements
Xeon processors in the NetApp FAS and increasing storage efficiency.

3. Primary Data Center Secondary Data Center
Microsoft Office Microsoft Tape Library
SharePoint Server SQL Server
Linux/UNIX PC
Servers Server E&P
Portal
Microsoft Windows
Vista, Windows 7
64-Bit Workstations
10 GbE
NetApp Flash Cache
NetApp Open Systems CIFS, NFS, iSCSI
NetApp SnapMirror
SnapVault
SMB 2.0 NetApp Deduplication
LAN WAN
NetApp Snapshot
NetApp SnapRestore
NetApp FAS6080 NetApp FAS6280 NetApp SnapVault NetApp FAS6080 NetApp FAS6280
running NetApp running NetApp
Data ONTAP 8 with Data ONTAP 8 with
Intel Xeon Processor Intel Xeon Processor
NetApp FlexClone NetApp FlexVol
Figure 1) Apache Corporation storage infrastructure.
Apache also leverages the NetApp When deployed on Apache’s 10GbE storage management time. The com-
disaster recovery technologies to network, the NetApp FAS systems with pany leverages Data ONTAP 8 and its
replicate data from regions outside the Intel processors reduce latency and 64-bit aggregates to store entire data-
United States, such as Argentina and improve performance. “Performance bases—such as those that support
the United Kingdom, back to its Texas technologies from NetApp and Intel Apache exploration groups—on a single
headquarters. Backup tapes are now allow us to push the 10Gb-per-second aggregate while simplifying database
only needed on a quarterly basis. The limits of 10GbE connectivity and almost management. The unified NetApp
IT staff uses NetApp Snapshot™ and instantaneously transfer large amounts storage platform enables the team to
SnapRestore® technologies for local of data that employees request from manage petabytes of storage as a
data protection, with incremental our systems,” notes Lauritsen. single scalable entity.
copies automatically created hourly.
The effects of the performance “NetApp enables us to manage more
Business Benefits enhancements on staff activities are storage in less time,” says Lauritsen.
Better system performance, significant. For example, one office runs “Though we’ve seen 700% data growth
increased staff productivity geological models that used to take in the massive Petrel E&P platform
Performance gains from NetApp stor- 20 minutes to open and load into the environment, NetApp management and
age help Apache reservoir engineers, Schlumberger’s Petrel application. efficiency capabilities have enabled us
geologists, geophysicists, production It now takes less than 5 minutes. The to continue to manage growing data
engineers, and others effectively and SMB2 protocol supported by NetApp on our NetApp storage without adding
efficiently perform their day-to-day has delivered 25% performance head count.”
jobs. In the shared seismic working increases on Microsoft Windows 7
systems. The NetApp storage and NetApp data protection and disaster
environment, the company sees a
64-bit Microsoft Windows 7 environ- recovery capabilities reduce Apache
nearly 70% cache hit rate and reduced
ment have decreased the amount of IT staff time and help employees work
latency by a factor of 10 or more with
time it takes geoscientists to run tests without interruption. “Time is money,
NetApp Flash Cache. This means that
during huge survey projects from 10 particularly as it applies to geoscientists
70% of the time data is already stored
to 2 minutes. Improved system perfor- making the most informed scientific
in memory, eliminating the need for the
mance helps the geophysics team evaluations,” says Lauritsen. By nearly
system to retrieve data from the SATA
move faster on initiatives such as eliminating costly tape storage, NetApp
drives and delivering data in seconds
developing new technologies. SnapMirror and SnapVault save consid-
rather than minutes.
erable administrator time, allowing IT
The NetApp FAS6280 storage system Reduced storage and operational to quickly create backup copies and
and Intel Xeon 5600 series processor costs reducing recovery time from days to
handle large amounts of simultaneous NetApp efficiencies and storage just a few hours without impacting
requests on Schlumberger Petrel and management capabilities help Apache user productivity.
other exploration and production systems. optimize storage resources and reduce

4. “Though we’ve seen 700% data growth in the
massive Petrel E&P platform environment,
NetApp management and efficiency capabilities
have enabled us to continue to manage growing
data on our NetApp storage without adding
head count.”
Bradley Lauritsen
Director of Exploration Applications, Apache Corporation
Making way for continuous growth
SOLUTION COMPONENTS
Apache remains focused on expanding
its oil and gas exploration activities NetApp Products Protocols
across the world and growing the NetApp FAS6280, FAS6080, 10GbE
company through acquisitions. Apache FAS3270, and FAS3170 CIFS
will continue to leverage solutions that storage systems
help the company keep up with the NFS
Data ONTAP 8.0
rapid pace and explosive growth. iSCSI
“Accelerating our time to discovery is OnCommand Operations Manager
SMB2
vital to our continued success,” says Flash Cache
Lauritsen. “We need to help our users FlexClone Third-Party Products
spend more time developing prospects Intel Xeon 5600 series processors
SnapVault
and reservoir models and less time Microsoft Windows Server 2008
loading data and managing data SnapMirror
Schlumberger Petrel 2011 software
between applications. The high Deduplication
performance offered by NetApp
and Intel helps us accomplish this.”
NetApp creates innovative storage and © 2012 NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved. No portions of this document
may be reproduced without prior written consent of NetApp, Inc.
data management solutions that deliver Specifications are subject to change without notice. NetApp, the
NetApp logo, Go further, faster, FlexClone, OnCommand, SnapMirror,
outstanding cost efficiency and accelerate SnapRestore, Snapshot, and SnapVault are trademarks or registered
trademarks of NetApp, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.
www.netapp.com business breakthroughs. Discover our Intel, Xeon, and Intel Inside are registered trademarks of Intel
passion for helping companies around the Corporation. Windows and Microsoft are registered trademarks of
Microsoft Corporation. All other brands or products are trademarks or
world go further, faster at www.netapp.com. registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated
as such. CSS-6544-0312
Go further, faster ®