The petroleum industry mainly covers exploration, development, oil and gas storage and transportation, and petrochemicals. In petroleum exploration, storage technology has passed through optical-paper, analog tape, digital open-reel tape, cassette tape and disk stages. Distributed storage, with its scale-out architecture, massive-data management, elastic online expansion, and high bandwidth and availability, is now favored by many industry customers.

Recently the Sugon ParaStor distributed storage system won BGP’s NAS parallel-storage procurement project, providing a 30-node storage cluster for BGP.

Customer Requirements

BGP is China’s largest specialized engineering and technical service company engaged in geophysical exploration. Charged with the mission of finding oil and gas for the country, it continually explores the secrets of the subsurface. BGP’s business covers 29 provinces and municipalities in China and 59 countries overseas, providing technical services to nearly 200 oil companies worldwide, with operating revenue ranking first in the global geophysical industry for two consecutive years.

GeoEast, the integrated seismic data-processing and interpretation software, is a very large oil and gas exploration software suite with independent intellectual property of China National Petroleum Corporation. GeoEast integrates advanced technologies from geophysics, geology and HPC. By supporting sharing of multiple data types and collaborative work by multidisciplinary experts during seismic processing and interpretation, it is widely used at every stage of oil and gas exploration. In recent years, all of BGP’s major domestic oil and gas discoveries have used GeoEast. In 2018, raw data for a single BGP project approached 1.5 PB at the outset, requiring processed and interpreted storage of 7–8 times that capacity and I/O throughput above 15 GB/s—a severe challenge for storage.

Because BGP’s business is high-density and exploration data processing is real-time, GeoEast places multiple demands on storage: urgent expansion, stable and reliable systems, access bandwidth that can handle high throughput, and fast response times.

Solution

For many consecutive years Sugon has obtained directed-procurement qualifications from multiple geophysical-exploration units of PetroChina, Sinopec and CNOOC. It has a deep understanding of industry application characteristics and has optimized products and tuned performance accordingly, addressing explosive growth in geophysical data storage.

Sugon ParaStor supports online expansion to 4,096 nodes, truly reaching EB-class storage, while delivering linear growth in both capacity and performance of the whole storage system.

ParaStor improves stability from both hardware and software, combined with multiple fault-protection mechanisms. It supports both replication and erasure coding. By pooling data and balancing it across all nodes in the cluster, it reduces the impact of storage faults, raises self-healing capability and protects business continuity. For high-throughput challenges, ParaStor meets HPC storage I/O needs through a high-speed network, efficient modules and intelligent management.

Solution Value

Looking across Sugon’s more than 20 years of success in petroleum and energy, Sugon distributed storage, high-end unified storage, HPC, servers and other products and solutions are widely used in all kinds of petroleum information systems. In the future, with a deep understanding of the industry and continuous technological innovation, Sugon will drive more cooperation with petroleum and provide more excellent practical support for the industry’s intelligent transformation.