Panasas Solution Accelerates Fugro’s Seismic Data Delivery to its Customers for Faster Discovery of Oil & Gas Resources: Panasas, Inc., the global leader in parallel storage solutions for the High Performance Computing (HPC) market, announced today that Fugro N.V., a world leader in geotechnical, survey, and geoscience services, has boosted its seismic application performance by 5X since implementing Panasas ActiveStor Parallel Storage. The Panasas parallel storage solution allows Fugro to more quickly deliver vital geophysical data to the company’s exploration and production customers, thereby speeding up the discovery and retrieval of oil & gas reserves. The Netherlands-based Fugro, with its 12,000 employees stationed in more than 50 countries, provides geophysical, geological and engineering technical services to customers in the oil & gas, construction and mining industries. Fugro’s team of experts collects and interprets information about the earth’s surface, soil and rocks to help Fugro customers determine where and how deep to drill for oil and gas. The processing turnaround time and the quality of raw data are crucial elements in helping Fugro and its oil & gas customers create a business advantage. This deployment of Panasas parallel storage has improved the performance of Fugro’s Linux clusters, allowing the data-intensive applications to run faster, and leading to faster discovery, development and ultimate delivery of oil and gas to the global market. “Currently, we’re using Panasas storage for a survey project of the entire Gulf of Mexico and it requires the collection and manipulation of a tremendous amount of data,” said Matthew Grey, Unix/Linux systems manager at Fugro. “Previous direct attached storage and NFS-based solutions were taking too long to complete jobs because multiple users accessing the same storage resources brought our seismic application performance down to a crawl. By switching to Panasas storage, we have boosted our performance by a factor of five, allowing multiple users working on the same project to access the cluster without response time degradation. Whenever you put as much data as we deal with into one storage system, you’d better make sure the system is fast, reliable, and very easy to manage. Panasas has delivered.” The Panasas ActiveStor Parallel Storage Cluster with the Panasas DirectFLOW protocol delivers the performance that Fugro requires for its seismic processing because of direct access between the Linux cluster nodes and Panasas storage. This direct path eliminates the delays that are normally associated with traditional storage solutions based purely on NFS. The DirectFLOW protocol dramatically improves seismic processing runtimes by allowing Fugro jobs to complete faster. More time can be devoted to imaging and interpretative operations which can lead to more informed business decision-making and higher profitability. “The turnaround time in seismic processing is a make-or-break situation for Panasas customers such as Fugro. Not only does it impact the speed in which natural resources can be discovered and produced, but it also impacts the ability of Fugro’s customers to achieve a competitive edge,” said Len Rosenthal, chief marketing officer at Panasas. “With significant deployments at Fortune 100 energy companies around the globe, Panasas uniquely understands the storage imperatives of this market and consistently delivers demonstrable results to customers like Fugro.” The Panasas storage solution is based on the patented object-based PanFS parallel file system that enables customers to maximize application performance, while reducing the total cost of ownership in the storage infrastructure. Also, a single global namespace dramatically simplifies cluster management to improve IT productivity and the ability to perform more work. By offering Oil & Gas users a unified storage solution for both seismic processing and interpretation applications, Panasas parallel storage streamlines overall workflow processes and improves data availability.