DigitalGlobe officials said the project was undertaken to add support for two more satellites that the company plans to launch over the next two years to bolster its imagery business.
Longmont, Colo.-based Digital-Globe said that an upgrade of its storage capabilities is the key piece of the project.
To date, the company has added more than 200TB of high-end and midrange storage capacity with the installation of new systems from Hitachi Data Systems Corp. In addition, DigitalGlobe has installed new data management software from Advanced Digital Information Corp. (ADIC).
The upgrades have already quadrupled productivity, said Luc Trudel, director of IT operations at DigitalGlobe.
In addition, the company has rolled out Gigabit Ethernet ports throughout its LAN, and it plans to install 10Gbit/sec. Ethernet connectivity later this year in other parts of its infrastructure. Additional Satellites
"Once our second satellite is launched, data volume will increase fivefold, and the eventual launch of a third satellite will further increase data volume," Trudel said.
The company plans to launch the second satellite later this year and the third in 2008, he noted.
Trudel said that he hasn't calculated a return on investment for the project, but he added that the new infrastructure has already cut the time required to process satellite images from about 12 hours to three.
Trudel said that the file-sharing software from Redmond, Wash.-based ADIC helps lessen the workload of storage administrators, and "we're able to rapidly repurpose and/or expand storage to meet shifting production needs," he added.
The upgrade has also included the installation of numerous servers over the past year, including low- and high-end systems from Sun Microsystems Inc. and five Origin 3000 supercomputers from Mountain View, Calif.-based Silicon Graphics Inc.
The main challenge in the upgrade was understanding how best to configure the entire storage stack, from the physical layer -- the HDS arrays and Cisco 9506 Fibre Channel switches -- to the logical layer that includes ADIC's StorNext file system, according to Trudel.