Petrochemicals company Geofizyka Krakow is completing seismic processing jobs up to six times faster, after deploying the Panasas AS3000 parallel storage solution.
This performance boost positively impacts its geophysicists’ productivity by providing faster results and the opportunity to run more job iterations for improved imaging results. Ultimately the deployment of Panasas parallel storage also benefits Geofizyka Krakow’s oil and gas customers’ exploration efforts by providing faster project turnaround with high-quality results that will help them locate energy reserves faster.
Geofizyka Krakow, part of the Polish Oil and Gas Company (PGNiG), helps major energy exploration and production companies successfully explore hydrocarbon and geothermal water deposits, as well as monitor natural resource reservoirs throughout the world.
The company’s field seismic crews regularly transfer large quantities of seismic survey data to its IT centre. The data files can be tens or hundreds of GBs in size. From there, various seismic processing software algorithms, using WesternGeco’s OMEGA SPS application, are applied in order to form a resulting image file that represents geological layers and structures. The data is then interpreted by the company’s geophysicists to help its customers locate new oil and gas reserves or to maximise production from existing wells.
‘Before we deployed the Panasas AS3000, I regularly received calls from our geophysicists because they were frustrated with waiting for the results of seismic processing jobs,’ said Leszek Boryczko, computer systems manager at Geofizyka Krakow. ‘We ran several independent seismic processing jobs simultaneously and we found that a single I/O intensive job negatively affected all jobs competing for the same storage array. Our previous storage solution was comprised of two independent NFS-based, NAS solutions that quickly became an I/O bottleneck. It became clear that we needed a storage solution that could handle our diverse workload, yet retain management simplicity. Since deploying the Panasas AS3000 parallel storage solution I’ve found our overall IT workflow to be much more manageable. Furthermore, our geophysicists are no longer frustrated as they are experiencing a much quicker turnaround on their seismic processing jobs.’
The Panasas parallel storage solution is based on the patented object-based PanFS parallel file system that enables customers to maximise application and workflow performance, while reducing the total cost of ownership in the storage infrastructure. A single global namespace dramatically simplifies storage management to improve IT productivity and the ability to perform more work. By offering oil and gas users a unified storage solution for seismic processing, reservoir modelling, and seismic interpretation applications, as well as primary and secondary storage solutions, Panasas parallel storage is unique in the industry for its ability to streamline overall workflow processes and improve data availability.
