NEWS BRIEFS

Houston, TEXAS — IBM, and Seitel inc., a leading seismic data provider to the oil and gas industry, announced that they will work together to build one of the world’s largest storage area networks. This state-of-the-art SAN, the first of its kind in the industry and powered by IBM storage products including the Shark Enterprise Storage Server, IBM tape storage devices and Tivoli storage manager, is designed to offer Seitel customers worldwide complete access to North America’s largest seismic data library, via a web-enabled enterprise data management system.

“Seitel is taking a visionary step today, one that places it squarely at the forefront of the petroleum industry, changing the way traditional oil and gas exploration is done,” said Linda Sanford, senior vice president & group executive, IBM Storage Systems Group. “A storage area network the size and scope of this project requires that great products and services be matched with thought leadership and innovation, and that is just what Seitel is bringing to the table.”

Traditionally, the process of analyzing seismic data in the petroleum industry has been slowed by the lack of timely delivery, mostly due to the challenge of managing massive volumes of information and insufficient computing power. The promise of the SAN – the ability to offload data traffic from a companies local area network and servers onto a dedicated storage network, thus improving performance and availability of data across the enterprise – can allow seitel to network its one petabyte of seismic data. that data can be licensed and shared by over 800 major and independent oil and gas companies worldwide.

“The combination of IBM’s storage solutions capability and Seitel’s content including our seismic data library, create a leading-edge solution to oil and gas exploration that has never been offered to the industry before,” said Paul Frame, Chief Executive Officer, Seitel Inc. “We chose IBM as our technology partner because we are taking Seitel into the next generation of oil and gas exploration, an e-business infrastructure. We need a partner that not only understands our vision, but has the products and skills to implement it. We believe IBM is the leader in e-business and look forward to growing our relationship as our needs expand.”

IBM is the world’s largest information technology company, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. IBM creates, develops and manufactures the industry’s most advanced information technologies, including computer systems, software, networking systems, storage devices and microelectronics. For more information about IBM storage, visit http://www.ibm.com/storage . Seitel, which is headquartered in Houston, Tx., with offices in Calgary, Alberta; Denver, Co., and New Orleans, La., markets its proprietary seismic information/technology to more than 400 petroleum companies, selling data from its library and creating new seismic surveys under multi-client (“group shoot”) projects. It also selectively participates in oil and natural gas exploration and development programs with over 100 petroleum industry partners.

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