Panasas Inc. has added MicroSeismic Inc. to its roster of customers providing seismic imaging services for the oil and gas industry. MicroSeismic has boosted its passive seismic application performance by two times since deploying the Panasas ActiveStor parallel storage cluster, enabling the geophysical data services company to significantly reduce the time it takes to process data and return high-quality results to its customers who benefit from this time advantage in their drilling efforts.


Houston-based MicroSeismic is an industry leader in passive seismic data acquisition and analysis. Its passive seismic technology uses data from arrays of surface-located receivers to monitor reservoir response to stimulation injection and other production-related activities, allowing companies to increase the efficiency and volume of produced oil and gas. As with most seismic applications, specialists at MicroSeismic collect and manipulate vast amounts of data on a daily basis. The company uses 70 terabytes of Panasas parallel storage, which will allow MicroSeismic to take on more client projects in less time and improve overall IT productivity, truly giving it a competitive edge and higher profitability.


“Initially, we relied on the local storage provided with Linux servers, but when we introduced a new processing application, the servers became I/O-bound because the prior storage architecture wasn’t optimized to handle large files. By deploying Panasas ActiveStor parallel storage running the DirectFLOW protocol, we increased the performance of the Linux servers tenfold and had all of the throughput we needed to satisfy not only the existing applications but also future applications that are in development,” said Michael Thornton, vice president of data analysis at MicroSeismic. “We evaluated competitive storage, but Panasas ActiveStor storage was the only solution that would meet our objectives for performance, throughput and ease of management.”


Panasas ActiveStor Parallel Storage Cluster with its embedded PanFS parallel file system enables MicroSeismic to dramatically speed up application performance from 100 megabits per second using an existing SAN to more than 200 megabytes per second. A direct access path between MicroSeismic’s Linux cluster nodes and Panasas parallel storage eliminates delays that are normal for traditional SAN and NAS products. By doing so, passive seismic processing can be greatly accelerated, enabling MicroSeismic to take on more customer jobs.


“With growing demand from oil and gas customers around the globe, Panasas continues to be the leading parallel storage solution for seismic imaging and interpretation applications,” said Len Rosenthal, chief marketing officer at Panasas. “MicroSeismic’s adoption of leading-edge parallel technology underscores its industry leadership position and our commitment to help customers achieve a competitive edge and higher profitability.”

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