Panasas Inc. announced that China Petroleum & Chemical Corp. (Sinopec), China’s leading petroleum and natural gas producer, has chosen ActiveStor Parallel Storage Clusters for seismic information processing. The addition of Sinopec serves as milestone for the company as all three of China’s largest oil and gas exploration and production companies, PetroChina, China National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC) and Sinopec, are now utilizing Panasas’ high-performance parallel storage solutions.


“Sinopec has been impressed by the performance, simple installation process and overall ease-of-use of the Panasas storage solutions,” said Zhang Xin, a senior engineer at Sinopec’s Zhongyuan oil field and senior researcher for oil field prospecting. “Compared to the formerly deployed NAS and SAN storage systems, the Panasas storage clusters provide the ease of installation, simplicity of management and savings in IT overhead costs that allow us to focus on critical seismic analysis.”


Sinopec uses the Panasas Parallel Storage Cluster to analyze and process seismic information as it prospects for oil and natural gas in the Shengli and Zhonguyuen oil fields in eastern China. The Shengli field is the second largest source of oil in China, accounting for one-fifth of the country’s production. To satisfy the increasing performance needs of the seismic data, Sinopec deployed Linux clusters to meet the increasing demand of seismic data processing and analysis. To date, Sinopec has deployed 80 terabytes of Panasas parallel storage. This installation is supported by Panasas’ partner in China, ModernTech, which is based in Hong Kong.

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