Speaking at the ECIM E&P Data Management conference in Haugesund, Norway this month CGG’s Kerry Blinston unveiled ‘Akon,’ a new data management offering from CGG and Kadme that is being rolled-out to Norway’s Diskos upstream data community. Diskos was initiated in 1996 by Norway’s NPD, the regulator, to rationalize upstream data storage and offer an online, entitlements based service for well, production and seismics.
To maintain competition in the upstream data services arena, the Diskos contract is the subject of regular tenders. It was first awarded to an IBM-lead unit, then Landmark and most recently, Schlumberger. Until now the seismic data management software has been Landmark’s PetroBank, originally developed by IBM.
All is about to change as CGG deploys ‘Akon’ (Greek for Javelin—q.v. Diskos geddit?), a seismic data management solution built around the Trango product, acquired when CGG bought Fugro’s geoscience division in 2012.
Trango will store Norway’s seismic data on an IBM ‘Elastic Storage’ (general parallel file system—GPFS) unit that uses a combination of disk and tape robot to provide a unified view of data irrespective of storage location. Trango embeds a data model running on Oracle and based on the PPDM data model, a ‘standard, completely open, fully published model.’
The NPD’s Eric Toogood provided more details on the transfer of operations, a delicate operation as it is the first time that Diskos has been run sans PetroBank. Both the Trango back end and Kadme’s Whereoil client needed customization for the new task and, behind the scenes, a major data migration project is underway. Despite (or perhaps because of) earlier claims that PetroBank leveraged another ‘standard’ data model (POSC Epicentre), the knowledge required for getting data out of the old system requires an understanding of the data model that is only ‘in the hands of a few key people.’ This is proving ‘quite a challenge’ and, with the new system scheduled to go live on 1/01/2015, ‘time is running out.’
Around one petabyte of data is being moved from PetroBank to Akon and a data improvement/clean-up project is to run in parallel with the migration. The new PPDM data model represents an opportunity to receive and store data more efficiently.
While the Akon name has class, it will likely be replaced by the more prosaic ‘Diskos Seismic DB’ when the system goes live. More from ECIM in next month’s Oil IT Journal.
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