As announced at the San Antonio meet of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) last month, Landmark is to offer compressed seismic data storage through a ‘preferred provider’ deal with San Jose, CA-based Storewize Inc. (Storewize changed its name from Storwiz earlier this year.) The Storwize STN 6000 device sits between the user and disk storage and offers a claimed lossless compression of a factor of about four for a database and around twofold compression for seismic data.
Bit level
At an earlier SEG, (Oil ITJ December 1996) a half day event deliberated on the possibilities that data compression could have for the seismic business. Western Geophysical’s Zejlko Jericevic showed that lossless compression of 30-50% could be achieved on data stored in internal numerical formats such as IEEE Float or 24 bit internal. Although lossless compression of this order of magnitude is not new, what the Storewize technology brings to the table is ‘bit level’ access to the compressed data.
PrediSave
In fact, Storewize’s marketing now places less emphasis on high compression ratios—the company’s real intellectual property lies in the bit level access. This means that the compressed representation of a database for instance can actually be queried. Storewize also provides a software tool ‘PrediSave’ for computing the compression ROI for your data.
Background
A background compressor is also supplied for large volume legacy data. A ‘revert box’ software package decompresses data on the disk in the event of a failure of the STN device for ‘worst case disaster recovery.’ Storewize states that SEG Y data shows ‘55%’ compression, in other words, a 100TB of data is compressed to 45TB with ‘no impact’ on performance. The box is a 30 minute ‘plug and play’ install with no change to existing infrastructure.
Preferred provider
Landmark, as ‘preferred provider’ of the STN 6000 to the E&P industry, offers global delivery and installation of the product, as well as deployment and integration services. Storwize works with most network attached storage including EMC and NetApp. Storwize claims 120 appliances have shipped worldwide.
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