The challenge
Wintershall’s seismic data inventory plays an important role in providing key insights for exploration and production decisions. The company places a high priority on maintaining this valuable resource and ensuring its data quality and accessibility for further processing and interpretation.
When Wintershall needed to remaster a large inventory of its seismic data originally stored on 31,800 cartridges of various types, and 3,000 9-track open reel tapes, it relied on experience with Ovation during previous successful projects. Ovation has been performing large-scale tape transcription and data recovery services for the oil and gas industry since 1976, transcribing more than 500,000 tapes and cartridges every year. Its team of experts and an extensive inventory of equipment and proprietary software bring exhaustive quality control to ensure the highest quality output.
Solution
Wintershall awarded the transcription project to Ovation, the top specialists in re-mastering seismic data and transcription. To meet the project’s storage requirements, the scope of work required processes for migrating the data to high-density IBM® 3592 cartridges.
The Ovation team received the full inventory of media along with Wintershall’s standard tape storage boxes and generated a run-list for each box. Employing specialised software, experts copied the data on internal disk space. Using the legacy inventory, they identified all datasets, located the data in virtual boxes and organised it into products. Then they executed strategic processes to achieve quality requirements for various types of data.
Results and Benefits
Ovation successfully completed the project in accordance with the highest standards, transcribing the large volume field and gathers data to IBM® 3592 cartridges and producing a back-up copy. Experts wrote the processed data to TAR format at one megabyte (1MB) block lengths to IBM® 3592 cartridges also.
Wintershall can now be confident that its valuable geophysical data assets are preserved and transcribed into current technology formats, and will remain accessible for exploration and production decisions now and in the future.
- For more than forty years, Ovation has helped energy companies unlock and protect valuable information hidden within huge data volumes stored on all kinds of media formats.
- Ovation discovers, enhances, and preserves the value of your data – no matter its age or description.
- Using strict quality control, Ovation can duplicate your geophysical data for a second site, joint venture sharing, disaster recovery, risk management initiatives or any other purpose.
Find out more about how Ovation handles data
Find out more about how Ovation is a trusted data management partner that has helped thousands of worldwide customers preserve the integrity of their vital information assets.