NEWS BRIEFS

San Diego, CA — nStor Technologies, Inc., a leading supplier of enterprise SAN and storage solutions, announced that GX Technology Corporation (GXT), a worldwide geophysical service provider headquartered in Houston, Texas, has put nStor’s Fibre Channel storage solution at the heart of its processing center, assuring the company of ready access to vital customer data.

“We needed to add 6TB of RAID storage to our system,” commented Tony Sabatino, Vice President and Manager of GXT’s Houston Geophysical Service Center. “A lot of people we talked to could provide solutions up to about 3TB, but only nStor was able to supply us with the 6TB solution we needed with the performance, reliability and pricing we were looking for. In fact, we were behind schedule in implementation before nStor came on the scene. We have been particularly impressed with nStor’s commitment to solving our problem.”

“We knew GXT was serious about the reliability of the new system, and we knew we could help,” said David Tweed, nStor’s vice president of solution sales. “To meet their requirements, our professional services team actually brought GXT’s new server to our lab in San Diego, built the system, GX Technology Installs Major nStor Storage Solution thoroughly put it through its paces, and then shipped it back to Houston for installation. The entire physical installation at GXT’s site was completed in less than two days, and since then the system has not stopped running.”

GX Technology provides specialized data processing and advanced seismic imaging services supporting oil companies in their exploration and production efforts. Because these services are among the most computing-intensive – and capital intensive – in the world, oil companies are increasingly outsourcing this specialized processing to GXT. This allows GXT’s clients to focus their internal resources on their competitive strength, the interpretation of the resulting data.

“A typical prospect will have anywhere from 300GB to over 3.5TB of raw field data from the seismic acquisition phase of the project,” Sabatino said. “We read in this data, convert it to our own internal format and store it onto our RAID systems, which act as the central repository for the data during the life of the project.”

Once on the RAID storage system, the data is fed over a high-speed network to a 40-node server cluster, with each node equipped with additional storage capabilities. The data is divided equally across these nodes, and at that point the data processing and analysis begins. Depending on the amount of data, this process can take anywhere from one to six months to complete. At any one phase of the project, all of the nodes are simultaneously involved in processing the site data. However, because the processing of any one project is not continuous, multiple project data can loaded on each cluster, effectively allowing the team to run a large number of projects at once.

“Our objective is to keep these clusters running non-stop,” commented Gary Young, the GXT hardware engineer responsible for the system’s day-to-day operation. “The nStor RAID system allows us to keep our `pipeline’ of projects filled, thereby improving our productivity.”

“The RAID system also assures us of 100 percent availability of data,” Young added. “Losing that data would be a giant setback involving a tremendous amount of work to bring it back from the original field tapes and try to recover the data and the project. It would really cost us. The nStor system has added the reliability we need in expanding our operations.”

GX Technology is a leading provider of advanced seismic imaging solutions to the oil and gas industry, with a special focus on highly effective and compute-intensive prestack depth imaging. Its website can be accessed at http://www.gxt.com .

Headquartered in San Diego, California, nStor Technologies is a leading provider of highly integrated, enterprise-class Storage Area Network (SAN) solutions for computing operations that include Windows NT, Unix and Linux platforms. Additional information about nStor can be found by visiting the company’s web site at http://www.nstor.com .

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