Exploration Company Improves Storage Architecture for Success

Fabulous Success in Exploration

According to IDC research, one-fourth to one-third of the value generated by a typical oil and gas exploration and production company’s annual activities is owed to data. Lundin Energy Norway is no exception.

New Reservoir Simulations Need More Data Storage

Data is one of the most valuable resources in a smart world, and the volume of data collected in the oil and gas industry is growing exponentially. With target exploration fields shifting from conventional to unconventional areas — from land to sea, and even polar regions — the explorers are becoming increasingly dependent on IT. More data requires better data mining utilization, which results in a higher likelihood that an organization will find oil resources and control the market. In order to obtain more data and generate more profit, Lundin Energy Norway has adopted new reservoir simulation technologies that overcome many of the technical and environmental difficulties faced by offshore exploration, which in turn improves mining efficiency.

New technologies generate high volumes of data. Lundin worried its current storage architecture cannot meet its fast growing data storage requirements. In addition, 60 percent of Lundin’s data is cold data. The scalability of earlier storage system on the live network was insufficient and did not support tiered storage; the result was that all the company’s data was stored on expensive SAS disks, which resulted in high Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Further, new reservoir simulations require high-performance computing clusters.

The scope of work was linked to the following objectives:

• Lower costs;

• Apply robust, secure, flexible, scalable, and cost-effective solutions;

• Meet future storage needs;

• Coexist with cloud services.

Fully Symmetrical, Distributed File Storage Solutions

Huawei has cooperated with industry partners to launch ICT solutions that cover upstream, midstream, and downstream sectors for combining digital production with safety control and improved productivity. Huawei’s oil and gas solutions have been applied in 45 countries and regions around the world and serve fourteen of the top 20 global oil and gas companies.

Lundin’s CIO and his team came to appreciate Huawei’s attention to the company’s pain points with solutions for their fast-growing data storage demands. The flexible scale-out architecture of the OceanStor 9000 meets all future requirements for storage expansion, and includes the InfoTier function that separates the processing and storage for large amounts of cold data on a live network.

Located in Lysaker, near Oslo, Lundin’s primary datacenter (LDC3) has the rack space available to co-locate the new Network Attached Storage (NAS) platform with the current storage solution.

The OceanStor 9000 fully symmetrical distributed file storage systems supports high-performance read/write access, smooth scale-out from three to 288 nodes, up to 100 PB of capacity in a single file system, and includes Huawei’s proprietary InfoTurbo acceleration technology for up to 2.5 GB/s bandwidth over a single client. As a result, OceanStor 9000 systems support simplified management and maintenance, and eliminate data silos caused by multiple namespaces. The capacity and performance characteristics of Huawei’s OceanStor 9000 are designed to alleviate all customer storage concerns.

At the same time, the OceanStor 9000 InfoReplicator system provides data protection for erasure codes that are set and controlled at the directory level. Folders or files can be replicated between multiple OceanStor 9000 storage systems through IP links over Local Area Networks (LANs) or Wide Area Networks (WANs).

The storage system supports and configures remote replication in case data cannot be recovered for any reason. Remote replication requires data consistency based on snapshots in addition to full and incremental replication that are scheduled to operate automatically. The Lundin project requires a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) time of one day, with a minimum RPO time of 30 minutes.

Tiered Storage for Deep Exploration

The OceanStor 9000 InfoTier Dynamic Storage Tiering (DST) feature stores and migrates files between devices with different performance levels according to file properties. In this way, InfoTier enables user-specific processing speed and capacity assignments for ensuring optimal space utilization, enhanced access performance, and reduced deployment costs.

The tiered-storage features of the Huawei OceanStor 9000 solution specifically addresses Lundin’s requirement to manage hot and cold data separately, improve storage efficiency and data analysis, and boost processing performance.

The migration of to the new system would be completed in three months. Not only did the OceanStor 9000 deployment succeed in avoiding daily penalties, the project was completed in only half the time.

Huawei and the OceanStor 9000 are benefitting the company in the following ways:

Enable linear performance improvements by dynamically adding nodes to meet projected service growth.

Reduced the TCO by a significant amount by 35 percent using the OceanStor 9000 tiered storage functions.

Simplified configurations and graphical support for systems deployment.

Increased egress bandwidth through capacity expansion to avoid bandwidth bottlenecks and meet long-term customer requirements for rapid growth.