Ultera Systems Inc., a provider of high-performance virtual tape libraries, announced today that it is now shipping the Mirage Marine Recorder (MMR), designed to meet and exceed the performance, capacity and reliability requirements of major 3-D and full-wave marine seismic data acquisition and processing operations.


Ultera’s MMR appears as an IBM 3590/3592 or LTO tape drive, providing plug-and-play compatibility to any data acquisition system, and is available with either Fibrechannel or SCSI interfaces. Channel counts of existing acquisition systems can be increased to take advantage of the MMR’s increased data recording speed, i.e., 150MB/sec sustained recording speed compared to the 25MB/sec of existing disk-based marine recording systems. Productivity can easily be doubled, and quality control can be accomplished directly on the high-performance RAID.


The MMR implements a virtual tape autoloader with multiple virtual tape volumes. It automatically loads the next virtual tape volume upon executing the unload command from the acquisition system so that the next blank volume is instantly available for recording. The data on the RAID is recorded in actual tape format. All recording formats are supported, including SEG-Y and SEG-D technical standards.


“The MMR utilizes proven features of the Mirage Virtual Tape Library family of products: dual porting, which provides real-time monitoring and multiple virtual volumes for non-stop recording, and auto-archiving to conventional tape drive technologies. The end result is the MMR, a perfect fit for marine survey and exploration companies,” said Mo Nour, president and chief executive officer of Ultera.


According to Casey Jordan, vice president of system support for Seismic Equipment Solutions, “Ultera has demonstrated a unique ability to deliver disk-based virtual tape solutions that meet the requirements of the seismic data acquisition industry. The capability to archive/copy seismic test volumes to any attached tape drive is a huge plus, enabling efficiency, productivity and cost-saving throughout the entire data acquisition/data distribution process. We have tested the Ultera Mirage Data Recorder (MDR) for land seismic systems with industry-popular systems from Sercel, ION and others.”


The MMR is offered in a 2U rackmount configuration consisting of a 1U Mirage Controller and a 1U RAID system. The RAID system can be configured as a RAID 5 protected 3TB volume or a RAID 10 protected 2TB volume, depending on the level of fault tolerance and performance desired. The 3TB capacity is divided into user-configurable tape volume sizes and can be increased to up to 15TB and 1000 virtual tape volumes to ensure continuous data recording. MSRP is $49,000 with immediate availability.


For more information, visit http://www.ultera.com.