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Panasas ActiveStor Parallel Storage empowers Fairfield Industries
Enhanced reliability, ease of management, and superior support helps Fairfield accelerate results and reduce costs: Panasas announced that it is helping Fairfield Industries create a competitive edge with its ability to accelerate seismic imaging results for oil and gas customers. Panasas ActiveStor Parallel Storage has replaced previous network file system (NFS)-based, legacy storage at Fairfield, delivering enhanced reliability and management capabilities and backed by the Panasas team of support experts. As a result, Fairfield has been able to compress their storage space requirements, add nodes to their cluster infrastructure, and process more work without a glitch in seismic application processing performance. 
Fairfield Industries, based in Houston, is a recognized industry leader in 2D and 3D seismic processing. As an early adopter of parallel computing, Fairfield built one of the industry's first production Linux-based clusters for seismic data processing. The company has deployed Panasas parallel storage to support a 2,000-plus node Linux cluster. Using Panasas parallel storage, Fairfield now processes greater amounts of seismic data, which in turn can help their customers achieve faster discovery and recovery of new energy resources. "We needed robust, production-ready storage to replace older, end-of-life storage products. It was imperative that the new solution would perform reliably as we increase our data-intensive applications," said Richard Rowbatham, systems administrator at Fairfield. "Previously, we had to add more disk systems to gain additional bandwidth, but our new Panasas storage provides ample bandwidth along with its storage and has considerably reduced our storage footprint and administration time." Panasas ActiveStor parallel storage includes the patented DirectFLOW(R) protocol, a direct access path between Fairfield's Linux cluster nodes and their storage, eliminating delays inherent in traditional SAN and NAS architectures. The additional benefits of this increased efficiency allows Fairfield to take on and complete more customer projects in a shorter amount of time and to improve IT productivity and further reduce the overall cost of ownership in their IT infrastructure investments. PanFS, a patented object-based parallel file system inherent in Panasas ActiveStor Parallel Storage, is the technology that allows Fairfield to maximize application performance and eliminate storage system complexities. Also, a single global namespace and the parallel reconstruction capabilities of ActiveStor storage contribute to superior ease of management. "As the search for new oil and gas deposits continue at an all-time high, the need for better seismic imaging solutions are critical to companies like Fairfield Industries in achieving their business objectives and competitive advantage," said Len Rosenthal, chief marketing officer at Panasas. "As the leading supplier of storage systems to the oil and gas industry, we help our customers compete and win by providing parallel storage systems with reduced operational costs, greater processing capabilities, and ease of management that is unequalled in the storage industry."
Fairfield Industries, based in Houston, is a recognized industry leader in 2D and 3D seismic processing. As an early adopter of parallel computing, Fairfield built one of the industry's first production Linux-based clusters for seismic data processing. The company has deployed Panasas parallel storage to support a 2,000-plus node Linux cluster. Using Panasas parallel storage, Fairfield now processes greater amounts of seismic data, which in turn can help their customers achieve faster discovery and recovery of new energy resources. "We needed robust, production-ready storage to replace older, end-of-life storage products. It was imperative that the new solution would perform reliably as we increase our data-intensive applications," said Richard Rowbatham, systems administrator at Fairfield. "Previously, we had to add more disk systems to gain additional bandwidth, but our new Panasas storage provides ample bandwidth along with its storage and has considerably reduced our storage footprint and administration time." Panasas ActiveStor parallel storage includes the patented DirectFLOW(R) protocol, a direct access path between Fairfield's Linux cluster nodes and their storage, eliminating delays inherent in traditional SAN and NAS architectures. The additional benefits of this increased efficiency allows Fairfield to take on and complete more customer projects in a shorter amount of time and to improve IT productivity and further reduce the overall cost of ownership in their IT infrastructure investments. PanFS, a patented object-based parallel file system inherent in Panasas ActiveStor Parallel Storage, is the technology that allows Fairfield to maximize application performance and eliminate storage system complexities. Also, a single global namespace and the parallel reconstruction capabilities of ActiveStor storage contribute to superior ease of management. "As the search for new oil and gas deposits continue at an all-time high, the need for better seismic imaging solutions are critical to companies like Fairfield Industries in achieving their business objectives and competitive advantage," said Len Rosenthal, chief marketing officer at Panasas. "As the leading supplier of storage systems to the oil and gas industry, we help our customers compete and win by providing parallel storage systems with reduced operational costs, greater processing capabilities, and ease of management that is unequalled in the storage industry."