Geospatial Company Aerometrex in Australia Chooses Seagate

As a practitioner of aerial imagery and mapping, 3D modelling and airborne LiDAR surveys, Aerometrex Ltd has specific storage requirements.

Geospatial Company Aerometrex In Australia Chooses Seagate

The geospatial tech company needed to consolidate and expand its storage solutions to accelerate its data process and future-proof its data infrastructure as the company continues to grow.

Working with Seagate Technology Holdings plc, the company found a solution, to increase its storage space while decreasing rack space and consolidating processing power, enabling the business to stay ahead of the game.

Powering multimedia mapping
Aerometrex’s mission is to provide professional, accurate digital image mapping and geospatial engineering solutions to its clients by exploiting both existing and emerging air and ground imaging technologies. The company’s spatial solutions have underpinned many government and private sector projects such as infrastructure, engineering, construction, environmental and disaster management, transport and logistics, and energy and utilities.

Aerometrex products are renowned -for high standards of production quality and accuracy. The highly detailed aerial imagery requires large amounts of data that can be expensive and time consuming to store and process.

Supporting current and future data growth and throughput
Aerometrex needed better speed and larger storage to optimise its current business processes and support future growth. Since going public last year it has grown exponentially, requiring a storage solution which will grow with the business.

Keeping up with the exponential data growth
Aerometrex had 8 separate storage systems for different parts of the business which have been added as the business has grown organically. Having enough storage was an ongoing battle for the business. For example, last year it captured all of Greater Sydney from the air for digital mapping with the raw data alone 300TB of imagery. Or sometimes, some of its systems needs to write over 10TB large sequential streaming within a short period every day. The raw data was then processed, and each one of those images distilled down into 1 to 60KB file. The project was made up of more than 200 million tiny files.

“Seagate provided a tailored, high-performance mass data management infrastructure that allows us to continue growing our business and lowers TCO across multiple business functions,” said Aerometrex ICT manager Peter Montgomery.

Aerometrex needed a solution to prepare for future storage challenges, storing and processing new forms of image capture, as well as the use of AI and ML and fueling an exponential growth in data. It also needed to be able to access its data at all times and replicate data within 2 locations to ensure data security. Read more about moving large data sets.

Partnering with Seagate
Aerometrex selected Seagate because its solution provided affordable and fast mass data capacity. It worked with Seagate to adopt a combination storage solution – consisting of flash, SSDs and HDDs – that would bring together its 8 separate storage systems. Centralising its storage enabled Aerometrex to do on-the-fly backup replication, which has saved the business from doubling the IT team.

The Seagate solution improved Aerometrex’s image processing with its both IO/s and sequential write throughput. For example, thanks to the speed the storage can feed data into a machine, one machine on top of the storage takes half a day to do what previously took a week for 8 servers to complete. Seagate’s solution also allowed the business to consolidate its processing power, shifting its storage from scattered workstations and RAIDs into the server room for easier management.

Aerometrex selected an option that suited their specific needs with a simple licensing agreement and a configuration that the business can expand in the future.

Improved speed and reliability
Previously Aerometrex was considering building a data centre, but after consulting with Seagate, the IT team realised that its current processing power was under-utilised. The storage upgrade improved processing speeds while physical rack space needs decreased. Aerometrex has triple the amount of storage, while using a fifth of the space of its previous set up.

Working with Seagate has reduced the amount of time it takes Aerometrex to process very large data sets by up to 95%. This improves the experience for clients and reduces the risk of the system being interrupted during the process. Fewer man hours also mean employees can work with less stress. The storage has had a profound effect on a number of business metrics in addition to cost and delivery.

For example, the storage has resulted in lower error or return rates and improved system availability. Also, more efficient processing has reduced overheating issues, air conditioning bill has gone down, and no data has been lost during power outages.

The storage solution solved the issues any businesses like Aerometrex in multimedia and imaging industries may face. In addition, it is supporting Aerometrex’s future growth, allowing it to work with more clients on data-intensive projects without having to continue to add headcount to its IT. The business is able to scale and prepare for new forms of image capture and data analytics.

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