Those of us of the “older persuasion” can remember the advent of computing technology in our lives and jobs. When I started at Hart Energy in 1995, for instance, we didn’t even have email, let alone Internet access.

In the seismic world, the size of the datasets has almost always outpaced the ability of computer technology to store and manage the data. Nonetheless, contractors, processing shops and operators made due with whatever was available.

“In the early days, the digitized oil and gas data were stored on and accessed from direct-attached storage,” said Vaughn Miller, vice president of vertical business development at Avere Systems. “This meant that all of the storage was directly attached to individual computers or workstations. That created quite a few issues.”

In the 1990s there was an evolution toward network-attached storage, which Miller said was of some concern due to debate as to whether or not large amounts of data could be delivered over networks to workstations at a fast enough rate. However, in reality this type of storage actually accelerated data access in many applications because of file system technologies and low latency of networks.

As the industry moves through the second decade of the 21st century, little debate remains about the efficacy of these systems. However, according to Miller, the next evolutionary step is on the horizon—cloud storage.

Avere provides a hybrid solution that combines network-attached storage on premises as well as in the cloud. “In the first generation of this, hybrid off-premises or cloud storage might be used primarily for archival data,” Miller noted. “But we see the trend over the next few years going to where an increasing amount of geocomputing data will be both on premises and in the cloud.”

Companies like Avere are enabling this hybrid storage by allowing secure, high-performance data storage in the cloud. Miller noted that Avere also enables traditional applications to access the data without making any changes to those applications.

“Data security has been a barrier to cloud adoption in the past, but Avere is able to do the encryption and keep the keys for the encrypted data in the cloud, on premises and inside the firewall,” said Miller.

“In the case of seismic data, the cloud offers the opportunity to store archival data off-premises in a cost-effective manner,” added Tom Ledoux, senior systems engineer at Avere Systems. “It also offers a high-performance computing [HPC] environment in which Avere can provide very high throughput to both on-premises storage and cloud-based storage in the hybrid environment. For companies that are looking to the cloud for temporary HPC, they can now do both on-premises processing and even rent resources in the cloud to expand their compute infrastructure without having to buy new hardware.

“These types of hybrid systems won’t interfere with current data management policies and procedures,” he continued. “If you have policies and procedures on how to manage seismic data, which is a massive problem in and of itself, Avere won’t interrupt or change any of that—we just accelerate access to the data that are being used on a daily basis.”

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