Panasas Storage Boosts Seismic Application Performance at Fugro

Panasas, Inc. announced
today that Fugro N.V., a world leader in geotechnical, survey, and
geoscience services, has boosted its seismic application performance by
5X since implementing Panasas ActiveStor Parallel Storage. The Panasas
parallel storage solution allows Fugro to more quickly deliver vital
geophysical data to the company’s exploration and production customers,
thereby speeding up the discovery and retrieval of oil & gas
reserves.

The Netherlands-based Fugro, with its 12,000 employees
stationed in more than 50 countries, provides geophysical, geological
and engineering technical services to customers in the oil & gas,
construction and mining industries. Fugro’s team of experts collects
and interprets information about the earth’s surface, soil and rocks to
help Fugro customers determine where and how deep to drill for oil and
gas. The processing turnaround time and the quality of raw data are
crucial elements in helping Fugro and its oil & gas customers
create a business advantage. This deployment of Panasas parallel
storage has improved the performance of Fugro’s Linux clusters,
allowing the data-intensive applications to run faster, and leading to
faster discovery, development and ultimate delivery of oil and gas to
the global market.

"Currently, we’re using Panasas storage for a
survey project of the entire Gulf of Mexico and it requires the
collection and manipulation of a tremendous amount of data," said
Matthew Grey, Unix/Linux systems manager at Fugro. "Previous direct
attached storage and NFS-based solutions were taking too long to
complete jobs because multiple users accessing the same storage
resources brought our seismic application performance down to a crawl.
By switching to Panasas storage, we have boosted our performance by a
factor of five, allowing multiple users working on the same project to
access the cluster without response time degradation. Whenever you put
as much data as we deal with into one storage system, you’d better make
sure the system is fast, reliable, and very easy to manage. Panasas has
delivered."

The Panasas ActiveStor Parallel Storage Cluster with
the Panasas DirectFLOW protocol delivers the performance that Fugro
requires for its seismic processing because of direct access between
the Linux cluster nodes and Panasas storage. This direct path
eliminates the delays that are normally associated with traditional
storage solutions based purely on NFS. The DirectFLOW protocol
dramatically improves seismic processing runtimes by allowing Fugro
jobs to complete faster. More time can be devoted to imaging and
interpretative operations which can lead to more informed business
decision-making and higher profitability.

"The turnaround time in
seismic processing is a make-or-break situation for Panasas customers
such as Fugro. Not only does it impact the speed in which natural
resources can be discovered and produced, but it also impacts the
ability of Fugro’s customers to achieve a competitive edge," said Len
Rosenthal, chief marketing officer at Panasas. "With significant
deployments at Fortune 100 energy companies around the globe, Panasas
uniquely understands the storage imperatives of this market and
consistently delivers demonstrable results to customers like Fugro."

The
Panasas storage solution is based on the patented object-based PanFS
parallel file system that enables customers to maximize application
performance, while reducing the total cost of ownership in the storage
infrastructure. Also, a single global namespace dramatically simplifies
cluster management to improve IT productivity and the ability to
perform more work. By offering Oil & Gas users a unified storage
solution for both seismic processing and interpretation applications,
Panasas parallel storage streamlines overall workflow processes and
improves data availability.

Panasas,
Inc.

Fugro N.V.