INDUSTRY

Panasas, Inc., the leader in scalable network storage for Linux clusters, demonstrated its success in the oil and gas market today with the addition of Core Laboratories N.V., Maxus Energy, a wholly owned subsidiary of Repsol-YPF and Virtual Computer Corporation (VCC) to its growing customer base. Panasas also announced today that NuTec Energy Services has achieved more than 10X improvement in performance with the Panasas Active Scale Storage Cluster and has doubled its initial storage purchase to more than 50 terabytes (TB). As energy companies rapidly adopt Linux clusters to accelerate seismic data acquisition and processing capabilities, they require a high performance storage system to store and retrieve data in a massively parallel fashion. The Panasas Storage Cluster is derived from an object-based storage architecture and is designed from the ground up to complement Linux clusters. The Panasas Storage Cluster provides faster turnaround time for seismic processing and improved management for large datasets. "With our Panasas Storage Cluster, we have been able to achieve an order of magnitude improvement in performance," said Tony Katz, IT Manager at NuTec Energy Services. "While other products forced us to make trade-offs, the Panasas system delivers exceptional performance, but also excellent manageability and value." NuTec applies high performance computing solutions to accelerate the discovery of oil and natural gas deposits for leading energy companies. NuTec's cluster nodes are dynamically allocated to deliver the appropriate compute power for each task. The compute clusters are supported by two 25 TB Panasas Storage Clusters with the distributed architecture to allow each of the nodes in the cluster to store and retrieve data in a massively parallel fashion. With the Panasas Storage Cluster, NuTec analyzes seismic datasets in a faster, more efficient fashion, resulting in 10X performance gains. "Panasas has identified a significant need in cluster computing environments and is meeting that need with exceptional results," said Arun Taneja, Consulting Analyst and Founder at Taneja Group. "Industries such as oil and gas, that rely on high performance computing, can now benefit from a high performance storage solution. I continue to be extremely impressed with the technology and execution at Panasas." In a recent survey, respondents ranked the lack of scalable back-end storage options as a primary barrier to achieving an optimal cluster-computing environment. Panasas customers Core Labs, Maxus Energy, a wholly owned subsidiary of Repsol-YPF and VCC are breaking down this barrier and realizing the full potential of their Linux compute clusters to increase efficiency and productivity: -- Core Labs, a leading provider of seismic data processing and depth imaging services to the energy industry, is using the Panasas Storage Cluster to speed land and marine time and depth processing throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico. -- Maxus Energy, a wholly owned subsidiary of Repsol-YPF, leverages the Panasas Storage Cluster to accelerate analysis necessary to image the subsurface in the exploration for natural gas and crude oil. -- Virtual Computer Corporation provides compute-on-demand services and is using Panasas Active Scale Storage Cluster to speed storage data and retrieval. "The strong customer adoption we have experienced in the oil and gas industry validates the need for a storage architecture that optimizes cluster computing," said Garth Gibson, chief technology officer for Panasas. "By delivering a system that grows linearly in capacity and performance in a single namespace, the Panasas Storage Cluster is helping the oil and gas industry reach its high performance computing goals."