Ultera’s MMR appears as an IBM 3590/3592 or LTO tape drive, providing plug-and-play compatibility to any data acquisition system, and is available with either Fibrechannel or SCSI interfaces. (Photo courtesy of Ultera Systems Inc.)

Facilities guard against lightning strikes

Lightning strikes are a high risk occurrence for many petroleum production facilities in certain areas like Africa, Asia and South America. They can damage valuable equipment causing interruption of production and costly downtime. Companies need to maintain production on a constant basis despite these types of risks. The antiquated lightning rod that actually attracts lightening to a site is now being replaced by safer, more effective options. A number of petroleum companies are now using LEC’s engineered zones of protection to avoid lightning-related equipment damage and unscheduled downtime.

An oil production operation in Chad recently turned to Boulder, Colo.-based Lightning Eliminators and Consultants Inc. (LEC) to protect its production in an area known for its risks due to lightning strikes. An isokeraunic number of 30 indicates average lightning activity of about 13.7 strikes per sq mile (2.59 sq km) annually; the region developed by the oil production operation had an isokeraunic number of 120, indicating about 41 annual lightning strikes per square mile per year.

To ensure its no-strike warranty the company custom engineered, designed and deployed interconnected systems for strike prevention and low impedance grounding, which uses its Dissipation Array System (DAS). This charge transfer technology prevents strikes by continually lowering the voltage differential between the ground and charged storm clouds to below lightning potential. This preventative solution cuts storm-induced voltages as compared to the unprotected surroundings eliminating the risk of a lightning strike. DAS has accumulated more than 40,000 system-years with 99.85% no-strike performance. It is currently installed at locations in 55 countries worldwide, including facilities as large as 1.2 sq miles (3 sq km) and structures as high as 1,700 ft (518 m). www.LECglobal.com.

New recorder meets full-wave requirements

Ultera Systems Inc., a provider of high-performance virtual tape libraries, announced that it is now shipping the Mirage Marine Recorder (MMR), designed to meet and exceed the performance, capacity and reliability requirements of major 3-D and full-wave marine seismic data acquisition and processing operations.

Ultera’s MMR appears as an IBM 3590/3592 or LTO tape drive, providing plug-and-play compatibility to any data acquisition system, and is available with either Fibrechannel or SCSI interfaces. Channel counts of existing acquisition systems can be increased to take advantage of the MMR’s increased data recording speed, i.e., 150MB/second sustained recording speed compared to the 25MB/second of existing disk-based marine recording systems. Productivity can easily be doubled, and quality control can be accomplished directly on the high-performance RAID.

The MMR implements a virtual tape autoloader with multiple virtual tape volumes. It automatically loads the next virtual tape volume upon executing the unload command from the acquisition system so that the next blank volume is instantly available for recording. The data on the RAID is recorded in actual tape format. All recording formats are supported, including SEG-Y and SEG-D technical standards.

The MMR is offered in a two-unit rackmount configuration consisting of a one-unit Mirage Controller and a one-unit RAID system. The RAID system can be configured as a RAID 5 protected 3TB volume or a RAID 10 protected 2TB volume, depending on the level of fault tolerance and performance desired. The 3TB capacity is divided into user-configurable tape volume sizes and can be increased to up to 15TB and 1,000 virtual tape volumes to ensure continuous data recording. www.ultera.com.

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