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.

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Energy Demands Continue to GrowMuch 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

SOLUTION PROFILE

Scale to Reach Quality Decisions FasterSpeed 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 RequirementsAdvances 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.

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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 OperationsHitachi 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.

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Notice: This document is for informational purposes only, and does not set forth any warranty, expressed or implied, concerning any equipment or service offered or to be offered by Hitachi Data Systems Corporation.

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Managing massive amounts of data is often difficult due to the physics of moving the data, itself. The data deluge can introduce significant delays that impact workflows and make technology transitions very slow and difficult. Substantial cost savings and improved efficiencies can be achieved by leaving the data in place. Instead, reference it through a virtualized redirection or use policy-based processes, without manual intervention, to automatically ensure that the data is in the right place.

HNAS provides unique functionality to vir-tualize and migrate data on a file level, by interfacing through the NFS protocol and incorporating the virtualized files in a global namespace. This virtualized file access allows end users to leave the data where it is. It enables instant access via HNAS, regardless of whether the data is stored on an HNAS system or a system from a differ-ent vendor or even an Open Source system like Lustre. The system simply has to pro-vide an NFS-based access. End users can also choose to leverage the data migration functionality of HNAS to migrate the data by policy, which will automatically, and in the background, move the data to the correct place without manual intervention. This functionally dramatically simplifies technol-ogy transitions and enables end users to extract value from existing infrastructure and maintain operations while upgrading to new technology. It can also change or elimi-nate manual procedures for staging data for computation.

integrated to determine the optimal pro-ductions profile from the known resources. The data is varied and near real time. It is important for ingest and timely access to this data to have a unified storage architecture. This architecture is tasked with support-ing application requirements and handling unpredictable changes in data types as sen-sors and applications are put in production.

Most companies in the oil and gas industry are also global companies of significant size dealing with regulations that differ from country to country. For example, in many cases seismic data can’t leave the originat-ing country. Therefore, companies involved with handling this data have to be able to protect it from ending up in the wrong place. A complete information management system implemented using a rules-based engine that automatically enforces data pol-icies is essential to reduce complexity, avoid human error and simplify operations.

As part of the continuing digital evolution, modern-day oil field operations are becom-ing more automated. From drilling wells, to producing in the field or refining crude oil, industry operations are using thousands of sensors, valves and actuators to auto-mate activities and collect information (see Figure 3). These devices generally generate terabytes of data, or more, daily. That data must be collected, stored and analyzed, often on a real-time basis. Having access and the ability to scrutinize this data quickly provides companies with safer and more efficient work environments.

Hitachi Data Systems as Your Technology PartnerEnergy organizations must stay competitive in the market by enabling the most cost- efficient production and distribution. To support this, Hitachi Data Systems provides the leading storage virtualization system with a unified view of file- and block-based information. We enable the consolidation and use of existing storage systems and provide investment protection.

Hitachi Data Systems storage solutions for the oil and gas industry deliver cost efficiency, reliability, performance and advanced data man-agement features. Our technologies help you to meet the chal-lenges of today’s data-intensive oil and gas exploration and production activities, as well as strict project deadlines. HDS stor-age solutions provide an architecture that is designed for massive scalability while reducing complexity and saving on total cost of ownership.

Figure 3. Sensors, valves and actuators used throughout oil field operations generate terabytes of data daily that must be collected, stored and analyzed, often on a real-time basis.

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