Western Digital Case Study
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    Success story: Improving Big Data storage and processing for geoengineering specialist

    In this article, we present a successful installation of Open-E JovianDSS for a company that handles huge amounts geospatial data. Read on!

    Geospatial data – what exactly is this?

    Geospatial data (or spatial data) are basically all the data around us, e.g. the ones that serve as a spatial attribute in regards to a person’s position on the Earth (house, workplace, street, river and many others). From a business point of view, spatial data can be office locations, sales areas, and contact data. The data gathered is of extreme importance for the proper functioning of companies providing this kind of information as the sheer number of such data that can be pretty extensive.

    There are numerous industries, for example state land cadastre, urban cadastre, road sector, hydro and electric power, agriculture and forestry, geology and others, which would not be able to manage their work without a perfectly-developed remote sensing when it comes to digital aerial photography, aerial laser scanning, thermal aerial survey, or space imagery. All the collected geospatial data have to first be processed and later forwarded to clients according to their required formats, for example in a form of orthophotomaps, topographic and thematic maps, 3D models of cities, etc.

    Example case

    Aviation Accounting Center (АAC, trademark «Aerogeoinformatics») is a leading geoengineering company on the market of geospatial data collection and processing, and therefore a provider of the basis to geo-information systems. The company executes their orders worldwide.

    The data gathered by Aviation Accounting Center (AAC), as well as the results of their processing, are unique, valuable and above all, enormous. For this reason, servers and data storage systems serve a crucial role in the IT system of AAC, especially that present big numbers of terabytes of geospatial data will soon become even bigger within the coming years. The company required much more capacity, availability and performance for geospatial data storage. Also, their off-the-shelf servers did not have satisfying bandwidth to please all users with acceptable response times.

    In order to fulfill the growing demands of the company, Open-E Gold Partner Entry proposed a data storage solution with high-performance Western Digital hardware and Open-E JovianDSS software. Entry is a company that focuses on the manufacturing high-density hardware optimized for compact, manageable, breakdown-tolerant data systems.

    Initially, Aviation Accounting Center used stand-alone servers with dedicated storage. These were limited in capacity and often had single points of failure. Now, the solution installed at AAC is based on a software-defined solution (SDS) in a High Availability Load-balanced Storage setup with Open-E JovianDSS, a specialized OS based on Linux and the ZFS file system. Physically, it is a cluster built of two servers and a JBOD with a shared direct access.

    Western Digital-AAC-Entry-Open-E setup

    As AAC’s most important demand was to have continuous and automatic calculations guaranteed, a setup with standard x86 servers and the Ultrastar Data60 Storage Platform with He10 helium hard drives have been implemented. The platform by Western Digital, Open-E’s strategic Technology Partner, can scale out in many enclosures, as well as scale up in drive density and individual HDD capacity. It has been connected to mirrored standard x86 servers with high-bandwidth NICs while being maintained by Open-E JovianDSS.

     

    Western digital Ultrastar Data60 Storage Platform

     

    The solution turned out to be noticeably more scalable and provided outstanding capacity, throughput, connectivity and High Availability.

    Main components of the solution

    Due to its Linux basis, Open-E JovianDSS is compatible with almost every hardware on the market and drivers for the latest, state-of-the-art hardware components are included with every release.

    For the Aviation Accounting Center case, Entry was able to use the high-quality Ultrastar Data60 Storage Platform with He10 helium hard drives without risking interoperability issues.

    Find all Western Digital hardware confirmed for use with Open-E JovianDSS in our Hardware Compatibility list >>

    If you want to read this case in detail, find the complete Case Study here >>

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