1. Access to Data Determines Success
Production decline in mature oil and gas fields coupled
with heightened customer demand calls for industry
development of known energy reserves. Seismic data
is the basis for a better understanding of subsurface
structures. Faster and easier access to data shortens time
to important decisions about prospects.
SOLUTIONPROFILE
Energy Demands Continue to Grow
Much of the world is expected to significantly
increase energy consumption over the next decade,
especially emerging economies. In China alone the
number of cars have gone from 5 million in 1990 to
well over 30 million today, and is expected to hit 100
million by 2020. As a result, the need to find new
energy sources continues to grow.
To meet this demand, the oil and gas industry has
turned to more sophisticated analysis and gathering
higher fidelity data in ever-increasing datasets. These
new tools improve the chances of success and
reduce time to discovery.
Additionally, these businesses must produce and
deliver oil and gas to consumers globally, cost-
efficiently and on time. These industries are truly
global and have wide-ranging influence, from explo-
ration and production, to refining and retail. They
also work in the production of raw material that is the
basis for much of the chemical industry and items in
everyday use. Such items include synthetic fabrics for
clothing and plastic for everything from water bottles
to building materials, even the asphalt we drive on.
Achieve Higher Quality Decisions Faster for a Competitive
Edge in the Oil and Gas Industry
2. SOLUTION PROFILE
Scale to Reach Quality
Decisions Faster
Speed is essential when exploration
organizations try to determine the com-
mercial viability of tapping new reservoirs
to meet increasing energy demands. The
key to accelerating analysis and quality
decision-making is the ability to store and
manage rapidly expanding volumes of seis-
mic data. Data from exploration equipment,
including new technologies such as down-
hole sensors, and ever-increasing fidelity
data coming from geophones and hydro-
phones, constitute the diverse sets of data
that must be considered. The combination
of a multitude of data sources and faster
acquisition drives up the size of the data-
sets, which today easily reaches into the
petabyte range per square kilometer.
Large investments depend on making
high-quality decisions within project dead-
lines. The cost per well is in the US$20M
range for on-shore projects and can go
beyond US$200M per off-shore well.
Making the right decisions is crucial and
can ultimately determine the success of a
project and the future of a company. It’s
important to provide constant access to the
data and have data protection architected
into the solution from the outset.
With today’s competition to find energy
sources, the goal is to better interpret more
data in less time. The key to accelerating
analysis workflows and decision-making
is the ability to store and access rapidly
expanding volumes of seismic data. Making
data accessible to the appropriate parties
in a reasonable time for analysis is critical to
avoid performance bottlenecks that can add
days or weeks to the discovery process.
Keep Pace With Evolving
Requirements
Advances in seismic imaging and analysis
tools are helping organizations speed the
discovery of new energy sources. These
advances also enable analysis of archived
data to re-evaluate the previous decisions
in light of new economic realities. Seismic
data typically is stored forever and must be
accessible for this re-examination.
To provide these capabilities, Hitachi
Content Platform is tightly integrated with
Hitachi NAS Platform (HNAS). The inter-
working of these products provides the
Figure 1. Hitachi Unified Storage family systems consolidate disparate storage solutions under a
single management platform.
3. 3
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required archive and search functionality to
make existing data of many formats avail-
able on short notice.
Over time, energy-imaging algorithms and
their implementations have evolved faster
than the available hardware. For example,
algorithms can be selectively tuned to get
a hardware-assisted boost by running on
field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs),
graphics processing units (GPUs) or other
accelerators or architectures. Thus, there
have been continued efforts to improve algo-
rithms and take advantage of new processor
technology. Simply put, such hardware
accelerates seismic analysis computational
workflows to a point where it is no longer the
primary limiting factor in the workflow.
IT infrastructures are challenged to “keep up”
with serving the data to the computational
operations. Unfortunately, I/O performance
bottlenecks can occur when traditional NAS
and SAN storage systems host the data and
feed into the computational workflows. Such
systems do not deliver the performance or
scalability required to support today’s energy
exploration efforts. These deficits become
especially evident during peak load times in a
shared environment where multiple demands
simultaneously stress the storage system.
The common approach is to simply add
more storage devices, which adds com-
plexity and cost but does not necessarily
solve the problem. What is needed is a
solution that is architected from the start to
scale and to handle diverse performance
requirements. HNAS network storage
systems are uniquely designed with hard-
ware that assists in the form of FPGAs
that provide the robust performance for
I/O operations (IOPS). This performance
is required to handle the mixed storage
workloads that always hit shared storage in
an environment with multiple applications.
HNAS family systems are also equipped
with industry-leading network connectivity
for throughput-oriented applications being
served through standard protocols, such as
NFS and CIFS.
The hardware-accelerated architecture
of HNAS also provides functionality not
found in other architectures. One example
is the intelligent deduplication functionality
that leverages the FPGAs to deliver as an
automatic process at hardware speeds.
This function is workload-aware and will
adaptively throttle its performance to remain
transparent and not interfere with the reg-
ular file services. Capacity savings of up to
90% can be achieved with the HNAS dedu-
plication function.
The storage behind HNAS nodes uses
a SAN and is an example of the unified
view of storage that Hitachi provides. This
configuration essentially provides the ease
of use and familiarity of NAS. It serves the
data to the clients in an up to 16PB global
namespace. At the same time, it provides
a tiered storage infrastructure and all the
functionality and performance of SAN on
the back end.
Optimize Operations
Hitachi Unified Storage (HUS) family sys-
tems provide a simple way to consolidate
disparate storage solutions in a unifying
architecture and single management frame-
work (see Figure 1). This consolidation not
only simplifies operations for upstream oil
and gas exploration and production, but
it can also seamlessly address enterprise
application areas. The workflow of the oil
and gas industry travels from upstream
exploration and production into the
so-called midstream and downstream. As
it progresses, applications like enterprise
resource planning (ERP) for managing
assets of production and eventually resale
come into play (see Figure 2). These appli-
cations need storage solutions that are
integrated with the rest of the infrastructure.
A common solution for both file-based and
block-based data can significantly simplify
infrastructures and reduce operational cost.
The VSP family as well as the upper range of
the HUS family offer increased performance
and scalability. These attributes make an
offering composed of HNAS and HUS
VM or a VSP system a unique solution for
high-performance file sharing. It includes
many features and functionality previously only
found on high-end enterprise-class systems.
Advanced virtualization technology for both
file and block storage eases deployment and
migration and drives up utilization to provide a
superior economy of operation.
It is becoming increasingly critical in the oil
and gas industry to integrate data flows
from sensors monitoring the extraction
of oil and gas from active fields. Financial
and even weather-related data must be
Figure 2. As you follow the oil and gas workflow, applications like ERP for managing assets of
production and eventually resale come into play.
