An article in Storage Switzerland reviews the use of Ocarina optimization in Brigham Exploration, an innovative oil and gas exploration and production firm. Brigham leverages the latest in 3D imaging technology including Schlumberger GeoFrame to develop new petroleum finds, but 3D visualization of data-sets brings new challenges in terms of server and storage scale requirements. Ocarina was able to shrink their data by over 90% for certain file types, and 30-40% overall savings. This was a substantial achievement given most of the data was compressed data in specialized formats including SEG-Y, for which Ocarina developed a specialized compression algorithm.

According to IT Manager David Kirchoff, "The ability to optimize the data and leave it in place appealed to us. Many of the geo-seismic applications that we use have very specific and somewhat elaborate directory structures, and moving that data around has proven to be problematic for the software. The last thing I can afford is to have one of our projects come to a halt because a file can't be found. The exploration process is too time consuming and too competitive to afford that risk" 

"Overall we are very satisfied with Ocarina Optimizer thus far. We will likely free up 20 to 30TBs worth of data, which will be the fastest return on investment I've ever seen in IT, but most important is the time this saves us by not having to constantly move data back and forth between different system. Everything can now reside, cost effectively, in one place." concluded Kirchhoff.


Read the entire article.