Data Management SAN for Oil and Gas

Data management is a crucial issue for oil and gas companies. For instance, seismic data of a 20 square-mile survey for an exploration company can easily generate 800 GB of data. The amount of data that is being stored and the duration it is kept online are growing rapidly, but the resources to manage it are not. This presents a considerable challenge to companies striving to exploit information for competitive advantage and storage professionals tasked with storing, managing, and protecting that data. With increasing use of time-lapse seismic surveys, the amount of data being collected continues to grow exponentially. The Sun data management Storage Area Network (SAN) architecture provides a comprehensive set of products and services that help ease management and allow you to consolidate storage resources on the network for better, more cost-effective management of data growth. The Sun Data Management solution is an end-to-end SAN solution that includes server, storage, tape, software, implementation, and support services. Sun' s Complete Storage Solutions are optimized for the Solaris Operating Environment, tailored to Sun servers, and yet are also open to heterogeneous environments. The architecture provides a common fullfabric SAN infrastructure combined with high-availability storage products that span from workgroups to the largest data centers.

Solution Overview

Data management is a crucial issue for oil and gas companies. For instance, seismic data of a 20 square-mile survey for an exploration company can easily generate 800 GB of data. The amount of data that is being stored and the duration it is kept online are growing rapidly, but the resources to manage it are not. This presents a considerable challenge to companies striving to exploit information for competitive advantage and storage professionals tasked with storing, managing, and protecting that data. With increasing use of time-lapse seismic surveys, the amount of data being collected continues to grow exponentially.

The Sun data management Storage Area Network (SAN) architecture provides a comprehensive set of products and services that help ease management and allow you to consolidate storage resources on the network for better, more cost-effective management of data growth.

The Sun Data Management solution is an end-to-end SAN solution that includes server, storage, tape, software, implementation, and support services. Sun's Complete Storage Solutions are optimized for the Solaris Operating Environment, tailored to Sun servers, and yet are also open to heterogeneous environments. The architecture provides a common fullfabric SAN infrastructure combined with high-availability storage products that span from workgroups to the largest data centers. In addition, Sun's StorEdge software strategy based on the Sun ONE architecture competitively enhances Sun's complete SAN solution by making it easier to design, deploy, and manage a massively scalable SAN.

The Sun StorEdge Open SAN Architecture is the first fully integrated open SAN solution optimized for Sun environments. With any-to-any connectivity, wide area coverage, SAN-wide load balancing, and increased support for open, heterogeneous SANs (including Linux, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, HP-UX, and IBM AIX), you can consolidate multiple storage devices into one efficient, scalable infrastructure. Sun helps you tie it all together by offering a complete range of consulting services for SAN architecture, deployment, and service.

Solution Features

Storage Consolidation

Many enterprises are exploring ways to bringing together applications, databases, and services onto fewer, highly reliable storage platforms. In this situation, you are faced with identifying where storage is located within the enterprise and whether it is utilized efficiently. Most disparate systems have stale or orphan data located throughout the network. As a solution that can track, monitor, and alert on the conditions of your enterprise storage, Sun StorEdge Resource Management Suite is the ideal choice. Additionally, the Sun StorEdge Performance system and manage and distribute it efficiently. Through consolidation, you are cutting high management costs associated with the uncontrolled proliferation of storage devices in your organization. Consequently, Sun's solution enables IT to centralize and simplify the administration of the storage infrastructure and offers the opportunity to lower total cost of ownership (TCO), utilize resources more efficiently, increase control, raise service levels, improve availability, and utilize existing skills more effectively.

Cost-Effective Resource Utilization

Organizations often require a simple, easy-to-use charge-back tool that provides visibility to where and how storage is utilized by storage consumers. You do not want your IT organization to be a cost center, but rather a profit center that contributes to the bottom line of your corporation. Sun StorEdge Resource Management Suite software allows for charge-back which holds users more accountable for the space they consume, improving return on storage assets, and enabling accurate forecasting for future storage needs. By deploying storage management solutions with Sun StorEdge Resource Management Suite software, you will be learning more about how data is used, the types of files created, and the rates of consumption. Sun StorEdge Utilization Suite (Sun SAM-FS) software helps you get the most of your investment by maximizing storage utilization through automated data management, archiving, and quick file recovery, such that you can store your data where it best satisfies your service level requirements. After implementing these solutions and realizing the options associated with it, you can improve your storage management costs.

High-Performance Computing (HPC)

Most oil and gas companies have data requirements that are growing exponentially. Your IT department is under enormous pressure to meet quality of storage service requirements that dictate a much smaller backup window than the 24 hours it currently takes. Sun StorEdge Performance Suite and StorEdge Utilization Suite software provide maximum scalability, performance, and throughput for data-intensive applications. This allows you to automatically stream data to tape devices at fully rated device speeds, eliminating the need for traditional "batch mode" backup, thus increasing the quality of storage service. Costs are dramatically reduced, because fewer hardware, software, and manual system administrators are required. Moreover, you are able to capitalize on the file system, file sharing, and volume management aspects of the software for rapidly growing capacity requirements, as well as to reduce cost and increase efficiencies.

Some systems require you to compromise throughput in order to achieve ideal storage utilization. This is not the case with the use of Sun StorEdge Performance Suite software and Sun StorEdge Utilization Suite. In fact, the San Diego Supercomputer Center recently achieved a data transfer rate of 828 megabytes per second to tapes by leveraging its SAN solution based on Sun's HPC SAN architecture.

Solution Benefits

The Sun Data Management SAN solution offers:

* Architectural consistency and open standards that make it easy to design, deploy, manage and support a high-performance, highly available, massively scalable SAN solution.

* Consistent SAN infrastructure and Storage ONE management tools that simplify SAN administration and management.

* An infrastructure that leverages the ability to design in redundant data paths between servers and storage.

* An infrastructure that uses a common infrastructure, management software, and rules that enable scalable solutions for the workgroup to high-end data center.

* A SAN environment that includes tape storage as part of the overall solution in a way that is transparent to the user.

* A consistent SAN infrastructure that is designed to help enterprises extract maximum value from current storage resources, while enabling them to leverage newer hardware and software products. Solution Partners

Sun works with leading vendors, such as Q Associates and Ovation Data Services to deliver highly available, scalable, reliable, and secure storage solutions for your exploration and production environment. These solutions are designed to help customers manage the ever-increasing volume of data present in the heterogeneous storage network environments that are present in the Oil and Gas industry.