Aviation Company Stores Big Data on StoneFly Petabyte NAS

Organization

Based in Canada, the organization is a leading provider of Iridium satellite communications, global flight tracking including live FDR streaming capabilities, and aircraft health monitoring solutions.

Industry

Aviation | Aerospace | High Tech | Aircraft Industry

Challenges

Tracking several hundred flights a day and monitoring the maintenance of countless others, this aviation tech company generated immense amounts of data and required a solution to store, process and manage that data efficiently.

The client had petabytes of data distributed over multiple traditional solutions, some which were obsolete, including tape drives, cloud solutions, and other storage media. This infrastructure caused the company to experience management difficulties, maintenance challenges and expensive overhead costs.

Furthermore, every time they required more storage, the aviation company’s only option was to do an entire forklift upgrade, as their legacy storage system had architectural incompatibilities between storage generations and limitations in scale-out architectures. This inconvenient process was not only time consuming, but also very expensive as they had to buy entirely new appliances.

“After an internal audit, we realized that our storage systems were slowing us down instead of helping us compete in the market. Our old storage system management was difficult, time consuming and maintenance was disruptive and costly” said Jake, the Data Center Administrator for the company.

They needed a solution capable of simplifying data storage management for large volumes of data, providing seamless scalability to avoid future infrastructure overhauls, reducing the cost of storage while enhancing storage resource utilization.

Solution

In light of the challenges the company was facing, our storage experts suggested StoneFly’s Enterprise-Level Super Scale Out (SSO) NAS storage solution purpose-built specifically for large amounts of data.

In line with the customer’s specifications, StoneFly offered three SSO NAS appliances and three 24-bay 12GB SAS expansion units. All chassis fully populated with 7200RPM 16TB enterprise SAS drives for a raw storage capacity of 2880 terabytes (TBs) or 2.8 petabytes (PBs).

Highly Performance File Storage System

The SSO NAS appliances come with standard dual 10-core Xeon processors with the upgradeable options to 28-core Xeon processors.

Focused on performance, the company chose the option with dual 28-core Xeon processors for each of the SSO appliances. With 3x the processing, their total workload is aggregated across the three appliances nodes, giving them exponentially better IOPS and faster read and write speeds than their legacy system.

Seamlessly Scalable Petabyte NAS System

In addition to the 24-bay expansion units, StoneFly’s SSO NAS systems enable the company to add up to 256 drives per appliance node.

They currently have a total of 70 drives set up per appliance node meaning that they still have room for more than 500 enterprise-level drives in their NAS system. In other words, they can add petabytes of storage almost seamlessly based on their needs. This is far more convenient, quick and economical compared to the traditional mix of storage architecture they previously had.

Easy-to-Manage Data Storage Systems

Powered by StoneFly’s patented NAS operating system, StoneFusion, the petabyte-scale NAS system has a unified management interface that data center administrators can use to manage, monitor, and control the NAS storage resources.

StoneFusion v8.4.10 offers real-time graphical reporting about CPU usage, network usage, memory usage and several other factors that simplifies data center management making it more convenient and user-friendly.

For more information about StoneFly SSO NAS appliances, please visit the SSO NAS appliances page or contact our storage experts to discuss your data storage projects.

Results

StoneFly’s Petabyte NAS system that was introduced to the company was a game changer. Instead of managing a number of various storage media, they had a purpose-built storage system with a centralized user-friendly GUI capable of storing all of their workloads. With the new infrastructure, Stonefly was able to deliver a cost-efficient product with enterprise-level data services.   

More Storage Capacity – Better Performance

Stonefly’s enterprise-grade petabyte NAS enabled the company to focus on their core business operations without having to worry about the state of their data storage systems.

With our petabyte NAS system, the company is now able to work efficiently, quickly and deliver better services to more customers.

“We feel empowered. Management has never been this simple. The storage system is fast and plays an effective role in our day-to-day operations” noted Oliver.

Secure Storage Provisioning with WORM & Immutable Snapshots

With services such as automated air-gapping, Write-Once Read-Many (WORM) storage, and immutable delta-based storage snapshots, the company can secure sensitive information without having to worry about data loss, data corruption, malicious access and unauthorized edits.

WORM enables the company to set up storage repositories that can be written once and then read as many times as necessary. However, the data within WORM storage cannot be edited making them regulatory compliant as enforced by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

The immutable snapshot technology takes snapshots that consume less storage space and cannot be edited. This means that they’re secure from threats like ransomware attacks, rogue software, malware, and viruses.

Store Your Data in a Reliable & Secure NAS System

Contact StoneFly

Phone:             +1 510 2651616

Email:            [email protected]