Historically, keeping such large amounts of data on disk -- one of CGG's typical seismic surveys is 1 Tbyte -- was simply too expensive. Now, with lower-cost ATA drives, the company has found the right cost/performance balance.
"This is a significant improvement in throughput, and the economics of ATA make it possible," Cambois says. He adds that CGG will keep the tapes for data archiving (naturellement!), but most of its primary computation data will reside on the LSI disks.
CGG currently runs 700 Tbytes of LSI storage; the 1,000 Tbytes of additional storage will be delivered on LSI's high-end 5884 storage controller platform. The system will use ATA drives initially -- LSI refused to name the manufacturer that will supply the drives -- and CGG expects to switch to serial ATA drives toward the end of the year.
The amount of floor space required to house 1 petabyte of disk storage, provided by around 10,000 100-Gbyte ATA drives, is not trivial. With 140 drives fitting in one cabinet, that's a total of more than 70 cabinets. CGG will install the storage primarily in its three main data centers, which are in Houston, London, and Kuala Lumpur.
However, LSI notes that higher-capacity ATA drives coming to market should improve the densities of such large-scale implementations. "There will be half-terabyte ATA drives in the market by this time next year," says Tom Georgens, president of LSI Logic Storage Systems.
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