Storage vault upgrade for Geoscience Australia
Storage vault upgrade for Geoscience Australia
Geoscience Australia is going to move its 400 terabyte vault of seismic data to new formats as part of a new US$15 million, three year project.
The government agency's vault in Canberra stores data tapes on 6000m of 10-m high shelving. These vaults hold 24,000 one-inch tapes and 300,000 half-inch tapes plus 150,000 3480 cartridges, 31,000 3590 cartridges and 15,000 8mm cartridges.
This data shows the results of petroleum exploration offshore and is used by a number of industries in petroleum, gas and mineral exploration.
The Petroleum Submerged Land Act states that this data is commonwealth property and must be stored at Geoscience Australia's vault. Copies of the tapes are later made available to the industry.
The reason why Geoscience Australia decided to make this move was because some of the master tapes were deteriorating.
The Geoscience Australia data repository manager Paula Cronin, said: "The oxide was peeling from the 21-track tapes, and there's only one machine in Australia that can read them, so we're going to use the 3590b tapes."
The 3590b tape can hold 10GB of data, compared to the capacity of a one-inch (21-track) 180MB, will make storing a 15 terabyte 3D survey on tape much easier.
Cronin expects the vault's storage space to reduce by 85 percent: "We've [Geoscience Australia] been given money to find more seismic data for oil exploration so this will make room."
"In the past six months we've loaned [to industry] 10 terabytes of data. The data has only been used by petroleum companies in exploration, because you need an enormous amount of computing power to read it.
"After the transfer, it will be a lot faster and quicker for industry to access and read the tapes."
The agency has contracted the transfer to SpectrumData and Guardian Data Seismic, while GeoCom Services Australia will conduct quality assurance.
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