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.

Achieve Higher Quality Decisions Faster for a Competitive Edge in the Oil and Gas Industry

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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.

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INSPIRE

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 ultimate 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 seis-mic data. Making data accessible to the appropriate parties in a reasonable time for analysis is critical to avoid performance bot-tlenecks 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 acces-sible for this type of re-examination. To provide these capabilities, Hitachi Content Platform is tightly integrated with Hitachi NAS Platform (HNAS). The interworking of these products

Figure 1. Hitachi Unified Storage family systems consolidate disparate storage solutions under a single management platform.

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provides the required archive and search functionality to make existing data of many formats available on short notice.

Over time, energy-imaging algorithms and their implementations have evolved faster than the available hardware. For example, algorithms might 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 a hardware assist 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 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. As you follow the oil and gas workflow from upstream exploration and production into the so-called mid-stream and downstream, applications like enterprise resource planning (ERP) for man-aging assets of production and eventually resale come into play (see Figure 2). These applications 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 latest addition to the HUS family of sys-tems, HUS VM, offers significantly increased performance and scalability. It includes many features and functionality previously

only found on high-end enterprise-class systems. Advanced virtualization technol-ogy 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 inte-grated to determine the optimal productions 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

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.

SP-103-C DG July 2013

architecture is tasked with supporting applica-tion requirements and handling unpredictable changes in data types as sensors and applica-tions 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. Whether in the areas of drilling wells, producing in the field or refining crude oil, these operations are using thousands of sensors, valves and actuators to automate activities and collect information (see Figure 3). These devices generate terabytes of data daily that 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 compet-itive 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

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.

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 management 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.