Tarmin and IBM help Premier Oil manage rapidly growing unstructured data, reduce storage cost, simplify compliance and increase business agility

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. and ARMONK, N.Y., July 12, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Premier Oil plc, a leading FTSE 250 independent upstream oil and gas company, has selected Tarmin, Inc., a leading provider of Data Defined Storage solutions, IBM and Eurotech Computer Services for an ongoing big data project to manage unstructured data in the Information Management Department. Premier aims to store its rapidly growing data, consolidate disparate repositories and archive and retain business critical information in a secure and reliable platform in order to reduce escalating storage costs, address information security and compliance concerns, and streamline management and integration of post-merger digital assets. The combined Data Defined Storage solution represents the first customer win in a multi-year agreement between IBM and Tarmin to bring a joint solution based on Tarmin GridBank and IBM Systems. The solution will enable Premier to gain competitive advantage through better exploitation of its unstructured geological seismic data as a strategic business asset.

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With significant operations in the North Sea and Asia, Premier is a fast growing participant in the global upstream oil and gas (O&G) market. Premier's sophisticated geophysical modeling processes, expansive geologic image library and growth through acquisition have resulted in a significant increase of data across its internationally distributed network of facilities. In order to ensure the highest levels of data accessibility, security and long term integrity across the entirety of its intercontinental operations, Premier selected the joint Tarmin and IBM Storage solution after considering a number of different vendor offerings.

"We feel that the new approach to unstructured data management, that GridBank offers, will optimally position us to respond to new opportunities in oil and gas exploration, development and production," said David Edwards, Group Head of Information Services at Premier. "The integrated IBM and Tarmin solution delivers multiple data management objectives in a single, cohesive offering."

Premier's volume of data, generated through oil and gas exploration, are growing ceaselessly, driven by new technologies and increasing sensor resolution. These factors are compounded through acquisition of digital assets across heterogeneous arrays of storage hardware through M&A activity. This leads to challenges associated with data discovery, on demand access, exploitation of data and a need for a single point of truth across the organization, key differentiators in ensuring that Premier is able to underpin business growth through identification and exploitation of opportunities. The joint Tarmin and IBM multi-TB, multi-site Data Defined Storage solution takes a data centric approach to providing media independent data storage, distributed Object Dedupe, compression and encryption, archival and tiering, failsafe replication and unified search across 500+ file types, including O&G specific formats, ensuring high availability continuous access to previously siloed data, trapped in remote data centers.

"With new technologies generating vast volumes of data, the need for intelligent solutions have become acute in our target markets", said Tony Klapcia of Eurotech, an IBM Premier Business Partner.  "The Tarmin and IBM combined solution will enable Premier to consolidate, manage, analyze and quantify its data, accelerating its ability to identify and exploit natural resources."

"Premier Oil's sophisticated geophysical modeling processes and its ever expanding geologic image library presents just the kind of Big Data management challenge that we are seeing across a host of different industries," said Dave Kay, Vice President, IBM Global Business Partners, Europe. "With Tarmin GridBank on the IBM Systems stack, Premier Oil is not only able to gain real insight from these digital assets, but can also reduce storage cost, simplify compliance and increase business agility at the same time."

"GridBank's O&G specific modules address the information tier of managing geological unstructured data, providing a complementary offering to the IBM System enterprise range of hardware at the storage tier," said Shahbaz Ali, President and CEO of Tarmin. "Tarmin is hugely excited to be working closely with IBM to address the growing Data Defined Storage market, uniquely positioning us to deliver reduced cost of storing unstructured data, simplified regulatory compliance and improved access to data, allowing advances such as accelerated identification of viable wells of natural resources for business growth."

The deal with Premier follows a recent agreement between IBM and Tarmin to collaborate with each other and also with their respective business partner Ecosystems to deliver Data Defined Storage solutions to enable their clients to gain value from the vast amount of data that they generate. Tarmin's innovative GridBank technology plays a vital role in responding to the pronounced need for flexible and effective solutions to the challenges of managing and storing unstructured data at an unprecedented scale.

For more information on the Data Defined Storage collaboration between IBM and Tarmin, visit http://Tarm.in/TarminIBM.

About Tarmin

Tarmin Inc., the leading provider of Data Defined Storage solutions, unlocks the value of data as a strategic business enabler, delivering a massively scalable, transparent and unified approach for consistent data management, storage, retention, security and search across cloud and traditional storage infrastructure. Tarmin's proprietary GridBank solution empowers organizations to store, control and understand the value of data as a competitive business asset, no matter its size, location or cost by uniting application, information and storage tiers into a single, integrated data centric management architecture.

About IBM

Further information on IBM can be found at www.ibm.com.

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SOURCE Tarmin Inc.