OIL & GAS

Sistina Software, the premier storage infrastructure software company delivering data-sharing solutions, today announced that NuTec Energy Services, the premier provider of seismic imaging services to the oil and gas industry and one of the world's largest commercial supercomputing entities, has migrated to a Linux-based storage infrastructure--a move made possible by Sistina GFS(TM), a highly scalable enterprise-class cluster file system on Linux. NuTec Energy's embrace of Linux clusters gives the company increased computing horsepower at a fraction of the cost of its former, proprietary high-performance computing systems. To increase processing speeds of the massive data sets involved in oil exploration while maintaining simple management and robust data protection, NuTec Energy selected Sistina GFS for use in its production environment. NuTec Energy required a cluster file system that could deliver high scalability, high availability and superior performance to handle vast amounts of seismic information for its customers. The company's move to a clustered, heterogeneous environment, which took just six weeks to complete and resulted in an 84 percent savings for the company in hardware costs alone, also leveraged blade-based computing with Sistina GFS, simplifying management of its blade-server deployment. "Deciding which hardware components to migrate to was relatively easy, but we had to figure out how we'd manage the data and add more nodes without interrupting daily business operations and customer service," said Dr. Michael S. Keehan, president of NuTec Energy Services. "We evaluated several cluster file systems and found that Linux clusters running Sistina GFS would provide the best price/performance ratio and scale on demand, without complicating data management. Thanks to Sistina's leading-edge clustering technology, we've met internal productivity and cost savings goals, while giving our customers improved speed of data processing." Due to the performance, scalability and affordability of the Linux operating system, NuTec Energy is moving toward this single OS as a common platform to support multi-vendor, heterogeneous solutions to ease administration and centralize management within the data center. Combining this strategy with Sistina GFS allows companies to consolidate existing server and storage resources into a single management domain, linking thousands of diverse data storage repositories into a massively scalable, secure and stable SAN. This improves availability, performance and ease of management in data center server environments, while simultaneously minimizing administration costs. "Many companies, such as NuTec, have a need to continually crunch exploding amounts of data while supporting clusters upwards of 200+ nodes," said Joaquin Ruiz, Sistina's vice president of marketing and product management. "Intel-based servers, Linux, and SAN technologies glued together by proven data-sharing software such as Sistina GFS is a powerful combination for enterprises challenged to manage increasing amounts of data and maximize existing assets." Next week at Storage Networking World in Orlando, Fla., NuTec Energy will be presenting a case study on its Linux SAN implementation at 3:45 - 4:15 p.m. ET, Wednesday, Oct. 29 in the Segura conference room, 1 & 2. NuTec's case study titled "Super Scalalable SANs: Using Intel, Linux, Fibre Channel and Ethernet Storage Technologies to Build out a High-Performance, Single Image Environment" will explain how innovative networking tools and technologies, such as Sistina GFS, are being deployed in enterprise data centers today. Sistina will also be exhibiting at Storage Networking World (Booth PP26), scheduled to take place from Oct. 27 - 30. Recognized as the de facto cluster file system on Linux, Sistina GFS is a highly stable solution for enterprise users requiring reliable access to data. In addition to NuTec Energy, Sistina GFS technology is in use at multiple financial, telecommunications, manufacturing, and other industries worldwide, to consolidate existing server and storage resources into a single management domain, essentially serving as the "central nervous system" in a SAN.