Seismic Imaging Experts in Oil and Gas Industry Choose Alacritech ANX 1500 for NFS Storage Acceleration

Tricon Geophysics Selects Alacritech to Accelerate Workflow for 2D and 3D Seismic Imaging

San Jose, CA –SEPTEMEBER 3, 2013- Alacritech, the pioneer in NFS storage acceleration, today announced that Tricon Geophysics (http://www.tricongeophysics.com/) has deployed Alacritech’s ANX 1500 Network File System (NFS) acceleration appliance to deliver dramatic 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 remarkable 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, executive vice president at 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 Alacritech’s 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 for 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, vice president of Marketing for 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.”

About Alacritech

Founded in 1997 by network storage pioneer Larry Boucher and a group of respected storage executives, Alacritech has set new records for the delivery of massive amounts of data with minimal latency. This performance is made possible by Alacritech’s patented data acceleration technology. The industry’s first true NFS acceleration appliance, the ANX 1500, mitigates Network Attached Storage (NAS) sprawl and dramatically improves the performance of NFS infrastructures; it does so without requiring the replacement of existing ecosystems or the surrender of ownership of mission-critical data. The ANX 1500 pays for itself faster than any other storage infrastructure solution and provides by far the lowest cost per NFS operations-per-second (OPS) in the industry. The company holds more than 70 patents and has received funding from Benchmark Capital, Berkeley International Capital Corporation, Institutional Venture Partners, Munder Capital Management, Needham Capital Partners, Quantum Technology Ventures and Shoreline Ventures. Alacritech can be found at www.alacritech.com, on Twitter: @Alacritech and on LinkedIn:www.linkedin.com/company/alacritech.