Llog Exploration Company, LLC. of Metairie, LA., is one of the most active oil and gas exploration companies in the Gulf of Mexico. As one of the Oil and Gas Financial Journal's Top Ten of privately-held exploration and production companies, evaluating, and exploiting potential and existing finds is critical for the company.

LLog's IT Manager, Terry Hovis, closely monitors the ability of his team to process the datasets used in these appraisals. These datasets are large - 30GB at the low end to upwards of 900GB for a complete project. Given this size, much time is spent to pull these datasets into memory, run the job and derive crossline and timeslice images from the larger dataset. Only after the images appear onscreen can the highly skilled geophysicists start to do the job of interpretation. Since geophysicists interpret hundreds of these images a day, any delay will significantly reduce productivity.

The challenge becomes even greater in the last few weeks leading up to an oil-and-gas lease auction (which happen at least twice a year). Lease bids can reach tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. Since leases can run to ten years in length, correctly evaluating a bid decision is essential in this highly competitive environment.

Hovis brought in Fusion-io's ioDrive Solid-state Storage devices to see how much time the new devices would save using their existing 32-bit Seismic Micro-Technology KINGDOM geosciences workflow application on their network. The result? As Hovis put it, "Our interpreters were very impressed with the simple introduction of the ioDrive and their immediate productivity gains - gains clearly apparent to the geophysicists in the dramatic reduction in their 'downtime' when manipulating large datasets."