Case Studies
ONStor and Dot Hill:
Partnering to Address Customer Needs
Based on Dot Hill's next generation storage platform, the 2730, the Pantera Clustered NAS solution offers Valtus Imagery a picture perfect solution - powerful and scalable storage to support the company's growth.
Headquartered in Calgary, Canada, Valtus Imagery Services is a high-volume, high-speed distributor of aerial and satellite imagery.
Valtus stores large imagery mosaic datasets in its servers that are used to create images customized by area, resolution and coordinate systems. Valtus imagery is used in many applications where precise images or reference systems are required, such as engineering design, municipal and government maps, and public and private land development.
Since 1995, Valtus has provided geospatial data for the oil and gas industry in Alberta, northeast British Columbia and southern Saskatchewan. Valtus has recently added complete coverage for Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Idaho, Wyoming, California, Texas and Utah. New Data is being added monthly.
Valtus recently expanded the scope of its operations, opening new offices in Boulder, Colo. As a result, the company's storage requirements are expanding, and Valtus expects to add 250 terabytes in the next year alone.
Today, Valtus' U.S.-based operations are leveraging ONStor Pantera Clustered Networked Attached Storage (NAS) as the primary storage environment for its library of aerial and satellite imagery. Valtus purchased the Pantera Clustered NAS with 50 terabytes of storage, which it expects to grow by 250 terabytes in early 2007.
ONStor Pantera is a cost-effective, high performance and highly available NAS offering designed for large scale server consolidation, combining enterprise performance and storage capacity, with advanced data management features.
The ONStor Pantera solution is among a new breed of storage solutions incorporating the Dot Hill Systems Corp.'s latest RAID storage offering, the 2730. Based on 2Gb Fibre Channel, serial attached SCSI (SAS) and serial ATA (SATA) protocols and advanced data management software functionality, the ONStor Pantera solution delivers superior performance and availability at a groundbreaking price point.
Dot Hill's 2730 has been adopted by a wide range of OEM partners as the foundation for best-in-class storage solutions. Ideal for a broad range of applications, the 2730 features a 4Gb Fibre Channel host interface and both Serial-ATA (SATA) and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) disk drives with industry-leading uptime. The 2730 offers scalability and flexibility, enabling customers to expand up to 56 high-performance SAS, low-cost SATA-II drives or any combination of the two for tiered storage implementations.
Valtus looked at NAS systems from as Network Appliance, Isilon, BlueArc and ONStor. However, the ONStor Pantera solution met all of Valtus' storage system requirements, says John Welter, vice president of technology at Valtus.
"The system provides efficient performance and system redundancy and scales for seamless, non-disruptive growth. The clustered solution also accommodates the limited power and rack space available at the collocation facility where our equipment is housed," says Welter.
The ONStor solution is key to powering Valtus' VISTA and VIEWS online Web services, which provide 24/7 access to Valtus' extensive inventory of geospatial content at www.valtus.com. Users can enter a street address and instantly view and order high-resolution digital satellite imagery of these cities. Once a visitor has found their desired location, it can be adjusted with zoom, pan, and re-sampling features and downloaded as a jpg, tif or geotiff within minutes. Users can also subscribe for access to the data via web services that integrate with geographic information systems (GIS) desktop applications.
Not only will the ONStor Pantera clustered storage allow for seamless growth by adding gateways, Welter notes that the system cost one-third to one-half that of competing solutions.
Aside from scoring major points on price/performance, Welter says the ONStor Pantera solution is easy to manage and scale -- a big plus for Valtus' IT shop that runs "mean and lean" with only two full-time IT pros devoted to storage/network infrastructure.
"With our previous NetApp solution, we always had to do a forklift upgrade when the equipment hit its performance limit," he says.
Valtus' IT staffers work with ONStor engineers on an as-needed basis. ONStor engineers were on site to assist with installation of the new Pantera system and training. However, Valtus will handle installation of the additional disk storage in-house, adding 40 to 50 terabytes at a time.
Via the ONStor solution, Welter is leveraging Distributed File System technologies for Windows, enabling the company to organize file share resources across multiple network servers into one logical structure for easier navigation and administration, and to ensure fault tolerance, load sharing, storage provisioning and replication.
Additionally, Welter is looking forward to leveraging some of the new features of the ONStor solution this year, which he says will further improve performance and ROI.
ONStor and Valtus have been working together since 2005. According to Bob Miller, ONStor's CEO, ONStor has worked hard to win Valtus' business and their trust. "At ONStor, we deliver personalized service and support which sets us apart from other storage vendors. Part of this is spending time with our customers, such as Valtus, to truly understand both their business and IT environments, to optimize solutions to meet their needs, and to provide world-class service and support."
Welter says they company sticks with ONStor because the storage solution provider responds to market changes. "For us, ONStor provides storage we can grow with long into the future," he says.
