NetApp fires up Australian gas exploration

May 12, 2009:Karoon Gas Australia, an ASX-listed energy exploration company, has implemented the NetApp FAS3020 "fabric-attached" storage system to speed up data access and address compliance.

Karoon explores, mainly for oil and gas in the Browse Basin in coastal waters off the northwest coast of Australia as well as overseas in South America (Brazil and Peru). The company was established in 2004 and has a market capitalisation of approximately $400 million.

Due to expanding business requirements, Karoon Gas needed to upgrade its IT infrastructure. The company’s existing peer-to-peer network with a 1TB Dell blade had produced a level of latency caused by users attempting to access the 2D and 3D seismic data sets, which are typically large files averaging from 50GB to 100GB each. This latency was causing a loss of productivity to those users who were accessing those data sets from different locations and as such was unacceptable toKaroon Gas, which requires fast access to the data at all times.

Jim Boyd, of Karoon Gas, says, “Our existing infrastructure was not serving the growth in the exploration data that we were capturing for our projects. It was simply not doing the job that an exploration company wants”.

“Our storage requirements were growing as we increased the amount of data we were capturing to explore potential oil and gas reserves. As such, we needed a reliable, scalable, and high-quality storage infrastructure that would support not only our growing team of employees but also the amount of data that needed to be captured and accessed.”

To alleviate these challenges and concerns, Karoon Gas sought out NetApp to help it develop a reliable, upgradable, centralised storage solution.

Karoon Gas installed the NetApp FAS3020 storage system. The FAS3020 is an enterprise-level, mission-critical data management platform, which is simple to manage and suitable for both SAN and NAS environments.

Karoon Gas doubled its networked storage capacity by adding two trays of disks with 14 disks in each tray at 300GB per disk. NetApp andKaroon Gas’s systems integrators worked in tandem over a 4-month period to make sure of a seamless migration and revamp of Karoon Gas’s storage infrastructure.

Thomas Durea Consulting, a NetApp Gold partner based in Victoria, helped implement this solution.

“The NetApp FAS3020 storage system has enabled Karoon Gas to create a storage infrastructure in which data protection and availability is guaranteed. The solution also provides Karoon Gas the ability to respond quickly to changes in the business environment with non-disruptive scaling and flexible allocation”, explains Thomas Durea Consulting.

Boyd had used NetApp solutions in his previous job and was very impressed by the simplicity and performance. Partnering with NetApp came is a natural decision.

Boyd says, “We were presented with three different vendor storage solutions, but we decided on NetApp because its solutions have been designed to accelerate our businesses performance, and we have evaluated that it will be more cost efficient.

“The most immediate benefit from partnering with NetApp is that the solution we implemented has provided us with secure, high-quality, and faster data retrieval. The NetAppFAS3020 has proven itself to be extremely reliable.”

Staff accessing the new NetApp solution noticed the increased speed with which data sets could be retrieved. Users reported that the new storage infrastructure’s performance was “fantastic” since it was quicker to access the large data files, thereby increasing their productivity. This has improvedKaroon Gas’s decision-making capabilities as more data can be stored and accessed quickly.

Boyd had also had a positive experience working with NetApp through the deployment phase. “NetApp has been a great partner for Karoon Gas. Throughout the migration to a new environment, NetApp was accessible, helpful, and responsive. The NetApp engineer who worked with us on our implementation was very good in helping us migrate our data into a new environment, and he was always contactable.”

Karoon Gas had the opportunity to test out NetApp’s responsiveness when a disk on its solution blew. Boyd says, “NetApp had guaranteed that if we had a problem, we would be up and running within four hours. When we did experience a blown disk, I received the replacement disk in 1.5 hours and the repair was under way. So we didn’t experience any downtime from the incident”.

“NetApp has helped us achieve better results, and it has shown how we can go further and faster with its solution.”

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