Inside Enterprise IT

In most cases, electronics and liquids do not mix. We’ve all had incidents that prove this. I’ve knocked over a glass of wine on my keyboard. It died, but I like to think it died happy with a belly full of Bordeaux. When my toddler ran into a pool I dove after him with my smart phone in my pocket. I wasn’t able to call home to complain about that one. I’ve clung to my digital camera with a death grip for fear that one unexpected toss of the boat would cast thousands of memories in the form of digital images from the palm of my hand to the bottom of the ocean floor.

But, sometimes putting electronics out to sea is the best thing you can do for your business. Geotrace, a leading seismic processing and imaging company based in Houston, packed the power of a data center into the hull of a ship to speed oil and gas exploration. The Geowave Endeavor, the ship that Geotrace deploys for 3D Seismic production, has a Dell PowerEdge M-series blade server high performance computing cluster on board. They have sixteen a fully-loaded Dell M1000e blade chassis that house a total of 256 Dell M600 blade servers networked with Dell PowerConnect M6220 Ethernet switches. Now that’s a boat load of servers.

I had a chance to catch up with Matt Gaskamp, Geotrace’s data center operations manager, briefly last week. He explained that having the ability to analyze and process information while off shore has given his company a significant edge over the competition. Previously, data collected while at sea could not be processed until the ship returned to shore. Now, Dell blade servers and workstations, software, and services allow Geotrace engineers to analyze the data as soon as it is gathered offshore, which has eliminated at minimum two months of wait time for its customers.

Energy efficiency is a concern with any data center, but it is especially important when it’s all housed on a ship. Geotrace uses Dell Remote Access Controllers and Dell OpenManage software to manage the blades remotely. It has power management tools that let their administrators easily configure maximum power thresholds by server or server group. To increase the energy efficiency of the servers while at sea Geotrace administrators can reset peak observed watts/amps and cumulative power, regulate and manage the fixed power supply aboard the ship.

The folks at Geotrace were kind enough to supply us with images of the Geowave Endeavor and the HPC cluster aboard the Endeavor, which is currently off the coast of Libya. You can view other images of the installation at Dell's Flickr pool. We also have a full case study on the Geotrace HPCC implementation if you'd like to read more.