North West Group Buys 15 Isilon IQ

Isilon Systems, Inc. announced that the North West Group has deployed Isilon scale-out NAS to power its aerial mapping and geospatial services workflow.

Using the Isilon IQ X-Series, North West Group has unified both its image processing and photogrammetric analysis onto a single, high performance, highly scalable, shared pool of storage, doubling workflow productivity, while reducing storage management to less than one full-time equivalent (FTE). With Isilon IQ, North West Group can now effectively support its aerial mapping missions, which produce more than one Terabyte (TB) of data per day, completing more projects in less time and with greater accuracy to drive new business growth.

"While customer demand for our services continues to increase, so does their appetite for higher-resolution final products delivered in less time," said John Welter, vice president of technology, North West Group. "This scenario is great for business but was simply too much for our previous clustered NAS system to handle. With Isilon IQ, we’ve doubled the rate at which we can deliver final product, while significantly cutting down on storage management, enabling us to stay ahead of market demand."

North West Group specializes in digital remote sensing, digital aerial photography, Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and related services in North America and the international market. As the scope, size and complexity of client projects increased, North West Group’s previous clustered NAS System reached a performance ceiling of 350-400 Megabytes per second (MBps), limiting workflow productivity and burdening its IT staff with unnecessary and continual data management challenges. With six aircrafts each flying aerial mapping missions around the world, North West Group needed a high performance storage system that could accelerate its image processing and photogrammetric operations without the need for additional capital or operating expense.

Working with Isilon value-added reseller and integrator PowerByte Solutions, Inc., North West Group deployed 15 Isilon IQ 12000X nodes, 15 Isilon IQ 12000EX capacity extension nodes and one Isilon IQ Accelerator performance extension node to unify its entire workflow onto a single storage resource with more than 350 TB of capacity and 1.2 Gigabytes per second (GBps) of aggregate throughput. With Isilon scale-out NAS, North West Group can complete more projects in less time and at less cost, driving increased operating leverage across its organization and enabling the company to accommodate previously unattainable levels of new business.

"The time- and data-sensitive nature of leading-edge aerial imaging and geospatial services is simply too much for other vendors’ SAN and NAS systems," said Sam Grocott, vice president of marketing, Isilon Systems. "North West Group helped pioneer the geospatial services industry and by using Isilon scale-out NAS to double their productivity, they are now setting a best practice for not only their own industry but any business looking to maximize the performance of large file-based applications."

"At PowerByte, we’re committed to providing best-of-breed IT solutions that enable our clients to do more with less and grow their bottom line," said Arnold Woelfe, president, PowerByte Solutions. "Isilon complements our mission perfectly, as its scale-out NAS solutions enable customers to accelerate mission-critical applications, while reducing capital and operating expense. North West Group’s success is a great example of exactly these kinds of results."