DigitalGlobe Accelerates HPC and Geospatial Information Services

EMC Corporation announced that
DigitalGlobe, provider of high-resolution earth imagery solutions has
deployed a NAS solution from EMC Isilon to accelerate the
performance of its Big Data-intensive geospatial information services.

"Implementing EMC Isilon has played a key
role in our overall effort to accelerate image delivery to our customers,"
said Jason Bucholtz, HPC Engineer at DigitalGlobe. "Reducing our average runtime by 20 percent and increasing production
efficiency by 50 percent enables us to deliver our imagery faster, ultimately
enabling our customers to save time and resources."

In addition
to providing significant runtime acceleration and production efficiency
increases, Isilon also provided DigitalGlobe with the following benefits:

• On-Demand Scalability: EMC Isilon
  scaled in lockstep with Digital Globe’s data-intensive storage demands, scaling
  10X in less than three years to support more than two petabytes of imagery the
  company collects each year.
• Simplified IT management and reduced IT
  costs: EMC Isilon enabled DigitalGlobe to add storage capacity with
  minimal effort, which allows the company to reduce management
  costs.

DigitalGlobe previously used Isilon solely for online delivery of imagery.
After examining a range of vendors, the company deployed the Isilon
X-Series as the storage foundation for its core system and HPC needs.

"DigitalGlobe provides crucial information to
many of today’s businesses, with data-intensive demands," said Sam
Grocott, vice president of marketing, Isilon. "By using EMC Isilon, they are able to set the bar for best practices in
high-performance computing and to keep pace with growing customer demand for
data."

DigitalGlobe
stores over 1.87 billion square kilometers of Earth imagery in its Image
Library and its content solutions support a variety of uses including:
location-based services, mapping and analysis, environmental monitoring, oil
and gas exploration, Internet portals and navigation technology.

Advanced
image processing techniques are applied to DigitalGlobe data for change
detection and feature extraction as well as correcting for satellite movement,
and atmospheric and geometric distortions. These corrections and enhancements
require high computational performance and data capacity.

Growing
demand for DigitalGlobe’s imagery, insight and analysis drove the
company to transform its storage infrastructure to meet HPC needs and to maximize Big Data throughput, speed and system
cost efficiency.

EMC and
DigitalGlobe were presenting at the Supercomputing ’11 Conference taking
place November 12-18, 2011 in Seattle.