Online Journal for E&P Geoscientists

Al-Issa, Khalid M.^*1; Al-Abdulhadi, Muhammad H.²; Al-Zahrani, Saeed H.³
(1) EXPEC Computer Center, Saudi ARAMCO, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. (2) EXPEC Computer Center, Saudi ARAMCO, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. (3) EXPEC Computer Center, Saudi ARAMCO, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

Keeping data for long term is one of the major challenges faced in today’s companies. Advancement in new seismic acquisition technologies increases the amount of data that needs to be processed, and thus increases the challenge of managing this data for longer periods of time. In Saudi ARAMCO, seismic field and processed data is considered a company asset and is stored on tapes for long term retention. This paper shares some of the challenges in archiving seismic data, and proposes a new solution that would enhance the current process of archiving data and ease the data transcription activities. Saudi ARAMCO has been utilizing a tape management system from LXI Corp., named TMS/IX since 2001, for handling the company seismic data archives. This system has multiple limitations which complicate the environment, and limit adopting new technologies at multiple layers and thus increase maintenance cost. To overcome these issues, a new solution that is based on IBM TSM has been implemented at Saudi ARAMCO. This new solution is composed of three layers: user interface, TSM access layer, and IBM TSM. The new solution shows improvement in tape media utilization, and huge reduction in required tape media during tape transcription compared to the legacy system. In this paper, we will give an overview of the legacy tape management system, details on the new implemented solutions, and will cover the results and findings after implementing the new solution in production environment.