Pemex CNPS: Oil and Gas Exploration with Sun Technology

Pemex's Exploration and Production division (CNPS) is responsible for processing seismic information using the industry's most advanced visualization and processing software. It also relies on state-of-the art technology to help geologists, geophysicists and engineers find, produce and manage Mexico's oil and gas reservoirs.

As the largest company in Mexico and the world's seventh largest petroleum company, Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) ranked 92nd on the Fortune 2002 Global 500 with revenues of more than $39.4 billion, producing over 3,000,000 barrels of petroleum daily. Through the parent corporation and its four subsidiaries—Exploration and Production, Refining, Gas and Basic Petrochemicals and Petrochemical—Pemex plays a key role in ensuring the continued economic growth of Mexico.

Pemex's Exploration and Production division, Centro Nacional de Procesado Sismológico (CNPS), is responsible for processing seismic information using the industry's most advanced visualization and processing software and relies on state-of-the art technology to help geologists, geophysicists and engineers find, produce and manage Mexico's oil and gas reservoirs. Because the organization plays such a critical role in the exploration and production process at Pemex, CNPS turned to Sun Microsystems to build a data center infrastructure that delivers exceptional power and performance to foster productivity, competitiveness and profitability across the entire organization.

Advanced Technology Critical

CNPS relies on leading-edge technology to deliver high quality services to other organizations within Pemex. In particular, CNPS manages hundreds of terabytes of data, processing a large percentage of the company's seismic, well log and other information into three-dimensional models of petroleum reservoirs to facilitate the analysis of the earth's subsurface. "The CNPS plays a critical role in helping Pemex decipher where, when and how to extract petroleum or gas," explains Fernando Fiorentino, technical manager of CNPS. "It is essential that the information provided be precise, reliable and timely to help us gain time to market, reduce costs and increase profitability."

Driven to deliver the most accurate seismic data available, CNPS chose to replace its old systems with Sun Fire servers. "By switching to Sun Fire servers, we can deploy a large capacity, highly available and powerful system to help quickly and reliably process a vast amount of data," notes Fiorentino. "At the same time, Sun provides us with a more affordable alternative to other systems."

The core infrastructure consists of an Oracle8i database residing on one Sun Fire 15K server running the Solaris Operating System, connected to a storage area network (SAN) comprising eight Sun StorEdge T3 disk arrays and 10 Sun StorEdge S1 disk arrays, in addition to a Sun StorEdge L700 tape library and the Sun Fire V880 server for master backup. Engineers rely on two Sun Blade 2000 workstations as consoles for the Sun Fire 15K server and storage solution.

Brocade WebTools software runs on the workstations and manages the SAN configuration, while the VERITAS Volume Manager manages all data, file systems, and volumes on the Sun Fire 15K server. The system uses Dynamic MultiPathing (DMP) for redundant connections to both SAN switches.

"The strong relationship between Sun and Oracle played a role in our decision to adopt Sun technology," explains Fiorentino. "The technologies integrate seamlessly, and the resulting performance and scalability from running Oracle on Sun servers is unmatched in the industry."

Sun Services performed both a SunReady Availability Assessment and Application Readiness Service, providing recommendations to help optimize the company's new data center. CNPS also invested in Enterprise Installation Services from Sun Service to receive the installation and configuration services needed to establish a foundation for reliability, availability, and serviceability for Sun server and Sun StorEdge technologies. All Sun equipment is supported by a SunSpectrum Gold agreement.

Dynamic Reconfiguration across the Infrastructure

With its strong reputation in the oil and gas industry, Sun quickly became the platform of choice for CNPS to deliver the highest level of system performance and availability possible. With the Sun Fire 15K server, Sun is the only major UNIX vendor to bring Dynamic System Domains and Dynamic Reconfiguration to the high-end and midrange server markets, offering CNPS uncompromised reliability, availability and scalability at a reasonable cost.

By helping to replace and reconfigure system hardware while the system is running, Sun's Dynamic Reconfiguration feature delivers continuous uptime, simplified resource management, flexibility for compute resources and performance and scalability.

The Sun Fire 15K server running the robust Solaris 8 Operating System reliably supports thousands of mission-critical applications, while at the same time offers the flexibility to support multiple configurations "on the fly" as CNPS application requirements change.

"The advantage of the Sun platform is that it offers the benefits of dynamic reconfiguration at all levels of the solution-through the Sun Fire 15K server and redundant paths to both the SAN switches and the T3 arrays," notes Fiorentino. "We have saved hours in downtime by eliminating the need to reboot each time we need to attach or detach system resources to meet changing application needs."

SAN Boosts Storage Availability

To provide high availability and rapid retrieval from a mass storage archive of seismic data, CNPS worked with Sun to connect its data center infrastructure to a SAN that is comprised of eight Sun StorEdge T3 disk arrays with up to 5.25 terabytes of storage. The Sun StorEdge Utilization Suite software, featuring Sun StorEdge SAM-FS software, seamlessly and transparently transfers seismic data from the archive to applications on the Sun Fire 15K server. The SAM-FS software also facilitates the transfer of nearly 110 terabytes of field data for processing by applications running on the Sun Fire 15K server.

"We required a SAN to effectively manage the large amount of data that we store, process and analyze daily," says Fiorentino. "The combination of the Sun StorEdge products and the Sun Fire server ensure the availability, scalability, accessibility, and backup that we need to manage the huge volume of seismic data that we create." The SAN also helps reduce costs at CNPS, which no longer needs to invest in direct-attach storage for each new server. In addition, the SAN administration tools and the robust Solaris environment enable administrators to quickly assign new storage to hosts, without experiencing system downtime.

The SAN at CNPS is comprised of two Brocade 16-port 2800 Silkworm Fiber Channel fabric switches that enable high speed communication between the Sun Fire 15K server and the Sun StorEdge arrays. For tape backup and restore, CNPS implemented a Sun StorEdge L700 tape library, which enables the company to back-up its massive database overnight. "We chose the Sun StorEdge L700 tape library because it can hold a large amount of data to meet our current needs, and can easily scale to support a growing amount of data," notes Fiorentino.

Sun Services Improve System Performance

To help optimize its new data center environment, CNPS engaged Sun Services to perform a SunReady Availability Assessment to assess the impact of people, processes and product issues on application availability levels. The first step involved gathering and evaluating information about existing CNPS work processes and IT systems.

"The SunReady Availability Assessment helped highlight certain gaps within our IT environment that were impacting system availability," says Fiorentino. "Based on Sun's recommendations, we have improved overall IT infrastructure availability by 99.99 percent and dramatically reduced the risk of outages."

To optimize the company's Sun Fire servers, Sun performed its Application Readiness Service, helping to design, configure and integrate the Sun Fire 15K server into the CNPS data center to deliver a sustainable, highly available platform. "The Application Readiness Service has helped us not only configure the Sun Fire 15K server to most effectively address the demands of our mission critical systems, it also helped us implement the server more quickly than we would have been able to otherwise."

CNPS was able to easily and quickly migrate its Landmark Graphics' ProMAX, Petrotek, Panther Software and several homemade database and 3D applications to the Sun Fire 15K server as a result of the SunReady Availability Assessment.

CNPS also took advantage of Sun's expertise by investing in the Enterprise Installation Services from Sun Service for all its Sun products. Sun support technicians began with a review of the current environment and provided recommendations for the new configuration. "With Sun experts managing the installation of our Sun equipment, our staff is available to focus on what they do best-processing and analyzing seismic data to find oil and gas reservoirs," comments Fiorentino.

Formal training in addition to ongoing knowledge transfer will equip CNPS systems administrators with the necessary skills to maintain the new environment going forward. "The knowledge transfer has been especially critical because we will rely on internal resources for the daily management of our new environment," notes Fiorentino. While CNPS is confident it has built a platform based on the most reliable technology available, the organization has a SunSpectrum Gold agreement for mission-critical support.

Sun support technicians have played a key role in developing a proactive plan to ensure optimal system performance. "The Sun team has worked very closely with us to deliver the most effective environment to meet our heavy data processing and storage needs," states Fiorentino. "We are impressed with both the performance of our Sun equipment and the expertise of the Sun team."

Saving with Sun Services and Technology

The expertise of Sun support technicians helped to lower the cost of deployment by limiting the investment that Pemex needed to make in training staff, as well as by shortening the time for Pemex to realize the benefits of faster processing and higher availability provided by the system. Equally important is the ability to scale the environment to meet ever-changing demands within the company.

By leveraging the skills and knowledge of Sun experts, CNPS can quickly rollout new applications and services in response to business needs. The savings are also measured in higher employee productivity, as staff now spends a fraction of the time previously needed to process seismic data. With the Sun Fire 15K server, employees can complete complex data analysis and transfers up to 300 percent faster than they previously could. For instance, loading seismic data from cartridges used to take an hour or more per cartridge, with an equal amount of time needed to retrieve data from the system. Today, the same tasks can be completed in 20 minutes or less.

"Our staff is often surprised by the performance of the Sun Fire server," says Roger Feria, systems administrator at CNPS. "Processes that once took ten hours can now be handled in a couple hours on Sun Fire 15K. When employees sorted seismic data using a Landmark Graphics' ProMAX application in the past, the process took eight hours or more. On the Sun Fire server, the same work was completed in less than two hours."

Concludes Fiorentino, "The savings are remarkable and can be seen in all areas. We continue to place new demands on the Sun systems without jeopardizing response times—so we're definitely maximizing our investment. With Sun, we are serving more users, processing more information, and accomplishing vital data transfers and analysis faster than ever."