Application Case of LandOcean

Project background:
As a leading oil exploitation and development technology R&D company, product distributor and technological service provider, LandOcean is active in Chinese and overseas markets. Underpinned by its independently developed technologies and products, it provides domestic and overseas oil companies with a wide range of technical services including exploring oil and gas fields, elevating drilling efficiency and exploiting oil and gas fields. However, LandOcean’s booming business has imposed great challenges for its existing storage system in terms of the storage capacity and I/O bandwidth, for example, data cannot be conveniently shared in a heterogeneous operation system and expansion of the existing storage system will affect the system's stability. Moreover, the storage system faces increasing requirements on the safety of the oil and earthquake data and numerous unpredicted inevitable factors such as man-made operation mistakes, network failures, power failure and fire in the equipment room, and hardware damage may interrupt businesses of the company and cause data losses, seriously affecting LandOcean’s core business system.

Project demands:
The user needs a production storage system and a backup storage system to process and backup oil and earthquake statistics. The production storage system must have high concurrent data read/write performance. Earthquake statistics are copied into the backup storage system according to the backup strategy to ensure the safety of statistics and realize high-speed backup.

Solution:
The storage project adopts two sets of the Scale-out NAS Gateway (SONG) integrated FC disk array products developed by BlueWhale to ensure sharing of files in the production system and high-bandwidth and high-concurrency data access. The follow figure shows the solution's topology.

Adopting 10 GE SONG storage system, the production system provides high-speed data read/write services. Statistics in the production system can be copied into the backup storage system by backup software, thus ensuring safety of the oil and earthquake statistics. The backup storage system adopts 4GE SONG storage system. In case that the production system fails, the backup system can provides data access services for the application client, thus preventing the business from being interrupted. The SONG storage system provides interfaces for data sharing on a heterogeneous platform and standard network file access protocols on the client such as NFS, CIFS and FTP. Adopting the open Scale-out structure, the file processing and data storage modules of the SONG storage system provide a large storage capacity, which can be expanded up to 16 PBs, while providing a large bandwidth and high reliability.

Application effect:
Centralized storage and data sharing: The SONG storage system realizes centralized storage and management of oil earthquake data, thus ensuring reliability and safety of the data, simplifying the data processing and using process, and reducing data redundancy and management complexity through distributed processing. Underpinned by the centralized storage technology of BWFS, the storage system enables file-level data sharing.
Cross-platform data sharing: BWFS realizes cross-platform data sharing in a heterogeneous system, supporting operating systems including Windows, Linux and Unix.
High-efficiency data transmission: The 10 GE SONG storage system is comparable to multiple 10 GE NAS nodes in terms of the performance. By fully exploiting the performance of the 10 GE network, it can fully meet the high requirement on the storage system’s I/O bandwidth in the data processing process. In addition, thanks to the direct data access technology, BWFS substantially improves the IOPS of the storage system and provides an optimal solution for delay-critical applications.
High availability: The SONG storage system adopts the open scale-out structure. As the user expands the computing capacity of its business system, the user can dynamically add NAS gateway nodes to expand the bandwidth in a linear manner to meet future business needs. When one NAS gateway node fails, another node will automatically substitute the failing one and handover the data IO, thus realizing automatic HA substitution and eliminating the risk of NAS node failures.
Online expansion of the storage capacity: The SONG storage system provides a huge storage capacity and supports online expansion of the storage capacity. When the storage capacity cannot meet the requirement, the administrator can add backend network storage devices into the system transparently to expand the storage capacity. Centralized monitoring and management: BWFS provides a Web interface to realize centralized management of the storage system and clients, enabling the user to operate, configure and view the system all on one management interface. In addition, users can monitor the performance of the storage system on the management interface, which can provide historical analysis reports, helping users monitor applications and analyze failures.