From Ross Philo, CEO Energistics
Neil
I thought you might find the following clarification re OSDU member numbers useful. Contrary to what you mentioned (and were clearly surprised by) in the latest Oil IT Journal, the number of active members of the OSDU Forum is not 750 but is actually around 150 (and increasing each month). Sometimes that number gets inflated to 190 when one includes companies that are Gold/Platinum members of The Open Group, who are allowed to participate across multiple forums, but they may or may not actually be active in OSDU, so the lower figure of 150+ is more accurate.
I suspect that the number you quoted of 750 members of OSDU is more likely the total number of members of The Open Group*.
Yours, Ross Philo
* Editor – indeed it was, apologies. At the last count (July 2020) OSDU membership had just topped 200.
From Andy James, Chief Product Officer, Bluware
Dear Editor,
I am following up on your article published in Volume 25, Number 3 of Oil IT Journal “Is SEG-Y useless?”. It explores an interesting topic, particularly as many companies are poised to move sub-surface data to the cloud and wondering if moving SEG-Y is the best approach. The article presents Bluware in the light of ‘dissing’ SEG-Y, which is not the case. The SEG-Y format is important for exchanging seismic data between systems. It has been fulfilling this function for years and given both the amount of data in SEG-Y format and the number of tools and applications that know how to speak SEG-Y, it will be relevant for many years to come.
Seismic surveys and the sensor technologies acquiring them result in massive data files with 10-fold survey size increases in recent years. The strategy of moving data between applications is becoming prohibitive because of the sheer size of the data and the amount of replication that is needed to support end-to-end workflows. A company starting with a 500GB post-stack survey could end the workflow with a 10TB data management challenge when you count (multiple stacks) x (multiple subsets) x (application specific formats) – and none of this data works well in the ubiquitous cloud storage type: object storage. One of clients rightly pointed out “There is no point in moving to the cloud if we don’t improve the workflow”. This means exploiting the strengths of the cloud too.
This is where we believe streaming data and providing fast API and random access to data stored in low cost storage tiers is the future for seismic data. We see some groups are pursuing strategies to cast SEG-Y across cloud object stores which is propped up by cloud specific code such as Lambda; while these solutions show real innovation and provide API-based access to data in place for things like data science, they still don’t get over the fact that the SEG-Y format was not designed for the cloud. This is where we feel Bluware VDS and the open source implementation, OpenVDS have the edge.
I hope this clarifies our position regarding SEG-Y, or more generally the future of seismic data in the cloud.
Cheers! Andy James.
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