Originally announced in Oil IT Journal Vol. 6 N° 1, Seitel’s first ‘Class One’ data center, located in Houston, will go live in March, offering web-based access to Seitel’s 1.4 Petabyte seismic library. A second data center will open in Calgary later this year.
Seitel Solutions
The centers are run by Seitel’s wholly-owned subsidiary Seitel Solutions and will provide online access to wells data and public domain information. The 72,000 square foot facility will serve data across the internet 24 hours per day, seven days a week.
Cost savings
Seitel expects that its investment in the data center will broaden its product and service offerings and will expand revenue opportunities in the future. The center will replace outsourced services in Canada and the United States, leading to cost savings for the second half of 2002.
Frame
Seitel president and CEO Paul Frame said, “Seitel Solutions will provide our clients a new state-of-the-art solution for finding oil and gas reserves at reduced costs. Our clients can receive seismic data ordered from our on-line archive, delivered to their workstations in less than ten minutes, on average.” Disaster recovery support will be assured by a broadband network connection between the Houston and Calgary data centers. GIS-based access to the Seitel dataset has been developed using Autodesk’s MapGuide distributed mapping tools.
O’Neill
The new center is headed up by Dennis O’Neill who was previously Schlumberger’s IT Architecture and Planning Manager. The Class One center is expected to cost around $18 million and will showcase a massive spatial dataset from Tobin International.
Superbase
Tobin’s Superbase, a suite of digital mapping tools is claimed to be the ‘largest dynamic, continuous topologically-structured mapping database in the commercial world.’ The high-resolution vector and raster data covering all of the continental U.S. as well as other areas of the world will give geographical context to users of the Seitel dataset. Seismic data can be viewed along with existing land surveys, State/County lines, oil and gas well locations, pipelines and roads. See also our exclusive interview with O’Neill on page 9.
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