ACADEMIA

Panasas announced that China National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC) has deployed the Panasas ActiveScale Storage Cluster to increase performance, streamline storage management and reduce overall IT costs as CNOOC transitions from mainframes to powerful and cost-effective Linux clusters. Through a partnership with ModernTech Computer & Peripheral Ltd. in Hong Kong, Panasas has now extended its global reach to include Mainland China to serve customers such as CNOOC. Headquartered in Beijing, CNOOC is one of the three largest state-owned oil and gas exploration and production companies in China. When the CNOOC Research Center began to replace aging UNIX mainframes with Linux clusters to support data processing applications, the company ran into a common challenge. CNOOC achieved more compute power for its Master Production Scheduling (MPS) application and Paradigm Focus seismic processing system; however, an existing legacy storage solution created performance bottlenecks and costly IT management problems. "The Panasas Storage Cluster was deployed after a careful evaluation of competitive high-speed storage alternatives, and we've solved the bottleneck problems caused by traditional NAS and SAN devices," said Liu Yongjiang, senior engineer at CNOOC's Research Center. "The Panasas solution has provided us with three times greater cluster performance than with our previous storage system. We have also simplified storage management, improved reliability and increased scalability so that we can take on more processing jobs without increasing IT costs." Like other Panasas oil and gas customers, CNOOC was able to quickly reap measurable benefits using the Panasas Storage Cluster. Panasas' combination of object-based storage devices and a parallel file system provides CNOOC with a system that significantly improves cluster performance and seamlessly integrates with both Linux clusters and existing legacy computing environments. The integrated hardware/software solution helped the CNOOC Research Center avoid a costly and time-consuming deployment and reduced many of the storage management burdens faced by IT administrators. From within a single, global namespace, the Panasas Storage Cluster delivers CNOOC both scalable capacity and bandwidth that allows the company to maximize the investment in Linux clusters and reduce the overall cost of ownership. "We're excited to have CNOOC join our growing family of oil and gas customers around the world whose highly competitive businesses rely on Panasas storage solutions to help drive business efficiencies and profitability," said Victor Perez, president and CEO at Panasas. "With the help of our valued partner ModernTech, we look forward to expanding the deployment of the Panasas Storage Cluster to additional customers throughout Mainland China."