Tricon Geophysics Deployed Alacritech ANX 1500 NFS)

Alacritech, Inc., in NFS
storage acceleration, announced that Tricon
Geophysics, Inc. has deployed its ANX 1500 Network File System
(NFS) acceleration appliance to deliver performance improvements to their 2D
and 3D seismic imaging services.

Tricon Geophysics’ services involve massive amounts of data, layering seismic
imaging with geophysical, geological and petrophysical information to give
clients in the oil and gas industry the richest set of sonic images, models and
information possible about a potential site.

By deploying the ANX 1500, Tricon Geophysics has seen improvements
in their work-flow and productivity.

"Improving overall productivity and
maintaining an efficient, streamlined environment are critical challenges in
this business," said John Contino, EVP, Tricon. "The most difficult bottleneck to tackle in
seismic data processing has historically been I/O data transfer rates for
floating point numbers. Speeding up that one function improves all of our jobs.
Alacritech’s technology consistently reduces the elapsed time of our production
runs without us having to spend the money to expand our networking, storage and
server-related capabilities. It’s really been a cost-effective solution."

Tricon deployed ANX 1500 with an available upgrade of 4TB of flash
memory, taking the ANX 1500 to a total of 8TB of cache, as well as an upgrade
of 48GB of memory, for a total of 96GB.

"We were fielding regular complaints
about sluggish response times on the network," said Sam Saqr, director
of IT, Tricon, in Houston, TX. "In
our business, delivery-time and accuracy are equally important. Since we
deployed the Alacritech ANX 1500 earlier this year, the complaints have completely
stopped. Read latency performance is averaging 1,800% faster, which translates
into much higher productivity for the team."

"Tricon Geophysics’ work is ideal
for the ANX 1500," said Doug Rainbolt, VP marketing, Alacritech.
"The large 2D and 3D models are
packed with layers of data generated from huge sound files. The ANX 1500 allows
their scientists and technicians to translate and manipulate the data into
visual 2D and 3D models, often of huge physical areas, and respond to client
requests for data manipulation much faster than before they deployed the
appliance."

An additional benefit Tricon noted was the speed increase when sorting large
amounts of data. Tricon’s clients often want to view information in a number of
different ways. Sorting the data for the client is time-consuming and taxed
Tricon’s storage network, but is necessary to the services they provide.

"With the ANX 1500 installed, we can
sort data three times faster than before," said Saqr.

"Equally
as important as the performance improvement was the ease and speed of
deployment," added Saqr. "It was critical for our work that we
were up and running with minimal downtime to install. Undergoing a massive
data-migration, which would have been required with other acceleration
solutions, was not an option for us."