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Flash drives for seismic storage

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Solid state or ''flash'' drives allow much faster data transfer than standard rotating hard drives, and the capacities are getting larger. Is it time to start considering them for seismic data storage?

Solid state drives (SSDs) based on NAND, the most common type of flash, are made up of transistors, hence the ''solid state'' in the name, and consume much less power, generate less heat, and aren''t sensitive to vibrations, compared to standard hard disk drives (HDDs).

Since SSDs don''t have to ''seek'' for data on a rapidly rotating platter, they have the advantage of much lower response times and much faster throughput to write and read data than hard disk drives. Further, SSDs can be deployed anywhere HDDs are used.

Hard disk drives have undergone a long period of evolution and are the most common, widely available form of computer storage available today.

These drives employ several spinning platters of magnetically sensitive material, and a number of mechanical components and electronics are used to read and write data on those platters. SSDs, in contrast, have no moving parts.

Questions for oil and gas

Here are a handful of pertinent questions that oil and gas exploration business units should be asking themselves.

Are they getting good return on investment on their current computing infrastructure?

Are their latest seismic surveys significantly larger than before?

Are they trying to interpret larger volumes, but feel their infrastructure can''t keep up?

Have they audited their data, cataloged their applications, and profiled the interaction between the two?

Are they trying the latest generation of analytics tools to get more out of their data?

What SSDs can do

Here are some possibilities of what SSDs can achieve:

Speed up some seismic processing jobs by a factor of 10

Reduce other seismic processing workflows from three weeks to one day

Free up 50 to 66 percent of their storage used for seismic interpretation

Multiply the productivity of geophysicists'' interpretation efforts

Reduce major network congestion and perhaps defer expensive network upgrades for interpretation desktops.

SSDs in oil and gas exploration can help reduce cycle times and finding costs, enabling a faster review of data. This leads to streamlined capture, movement, enhancement, and visualization workflows that achieve the coveted faster ''time to data.''

Using solid-state storage also brings an opportunity to improve prospect quality as it allows for the processing and reprocessing of raw seismic with more sophisticated algorithms, parameters, and scenarios in the same, or less time.

Analytics can also be applied to all of the data, historical and multi-domain, in order to seek out correlating features and to extrapolate trends.

SSD structure

SSDs can be applied as a performance tier in front of HDDs, as local storage inside of interpretation workstations, or as local scratch inside each compute node of a high-performance computing cluster.

In this performance tier example (see illustration), a set of SSDs are installed in a storage server (which also has a number of large HDDs) in a processing environment.

With raw seismic loaded to the HDD volumes, a batch job can be set up to sample ''chunks'' of seismic data from the source project to the SSDs. Then, other jobs running on the compute nodes would read the appropriate chunks across a storage network, process the data and then write the output back to the storage server SSD volume.

Another job could be executed to archive the results back to the HDD volumes and offload another copy to external disks or tape for delivery to the end customer.

GeoEnergy

A real-world implementation of solid-state storage in this application can be seen with GeoEnergy, a highly specialized seismic-processing company.
GeoEnergy, whose clients range from small, independent companies to some of the world''s largest energy producers, was challenged with processing jobs that were failing.

The reason: reliability issues with a storage performance tier using consumer-grade SSDs in its seismic data server.

To solve the problem, the company replaced the consumer-grade drives with enterprise-class SSDs and in doing so achieved job performance up to 10 times faster than they had, and realized consistent, reliable project execution. (You can read a case study on GeoEnergy''s successful SSD deployment at http://bit.ly/1aGtmal )

In oil and gas exploration, finding innovative ways to leverage enterprise-class solid-state storage can lead to an immediate competitive advantage.

Associated Companies
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