Geotrace Accelerates Oil and Gas Discovery With Isilon

Isilon Systems, Inc. announced that Geotrace, a reservoir services provider, has deployed Isilon IQ to power a robust suite of seismic data processing and analysis applications used to accelerate worldwide oil and gas discovery.

Using Isilon scale-out NAS, featuring its OneFS operating system, Geotrace has created a single global namespace for both its Unix and Linux-based cluster compute environments, streamlining seismic data access to reduce data processing times from weeks to days. With Isilon, Geotrace can complete more projects in less time and with greater accuracy, all while requiring less than one full-time equivalent (FTE) to manage the system.

"Our seismic data processing and analysis operations serve oil and gas leaders around the world, meaning our workflow is both mission-critical and very time-sensitive," said Matt Gaskamp, data center operations manager, Geotrace. "We don’t have time to manage multiple storage systems and perform the ongoing data migration necessary with traditional storage. With Isilon, all of our data is in one, immediately accessible location, allowing our engineers to work collaboratively around-the-clock and get more done, faster, with less cost."

Prior to using Isilon IQ, Geotrace employed separate traditional storage systems to support the two primary components of its workflow – seismic data processing and analysis. When Geotrace moved to a data center model leveraging both Unix and Linux-based cluster compute environments each running hundreds of servers to process and analyze data simultaneously, these traditional systems were incapable of providing the single global namespace or linear scaling of performance and capacity necessary to effectively power Geotrace’s workflow.

By turning to Isilon, Geotrace unified both its massive compute clusters onto a single, high-performance, highly scalable, shared pool of storage, enabling engineers to seamlessly access data between clusters at all stages of the workflow without having to migrate data back and forth, increasing productivity and accelerating time-to-results. With Isilon IQ, Geotrace eliminated the costly and time-consuming manual data migrations and lengthy scaling delays common when using traditional HPC storage alongside traditional SAN or NAS, improving efficiency and driving increased operating leverage.

"Traditional storage systems lack the performance, scalability and ease of use to effectively power seismic processing and analysis, forcing today’s most innovative oil and gas companies to deploy disparate, disconnected systems, or find a better alternative," said Sam Grocott, senior director of product management, Isilon Systems. "Geotrace is one of many leading-edge companies that have found an improved approach by deploying scale-out NAS. With Isilon, Geotrace unified its workflow and increased operational efficiency, demonstrating that with Isilon IQ, innovative organizations can do more – better – with less."