Sky Research is in the business of environmental remediation, focusing on wide area assessment and detection of unexploded ordnance (UXO) at active and formerly used military sites. Sky Research utilizes airborne and ground sensors such as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Hyperspectral Imager (HSI), Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), digital orthophotography, electromagnetic and magnetometry sensors, interfaced with GIS and advanced discrimination algorithms. Sky collects and processes high-quality, spatially dense data on thousands of acres. Its objective: to create accurate high-resolution imagery that will help remediation teams pinpoint where there is danger from UXOand just as importantly, where there is not.
Sky Research gathers a staggering amount of raw data from its airborne and ground-based systems. Then its up to the IT team to make sure all that raw data is available for analysis. After the analysts have processed the data and created maps, the team ensures that Skys customerssuch as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of Defense, and NASAcan quickly and reliably access those maps to guide their remediation efforts. There are only a few customers for Skys services, but theyre big, and their projects can be huge. If a major project comes in, Sky might need to double its size virtually overnight, adding technical fieldwork experts and data analysts. During the past five years, Sky has grown from 35 employees to 80, and from a storage capacity of 1TB to 48TB.
In the first few years of its growth, Sky used Dell servers with direct-attached storage (DAS). A lack of scalability and flexibility drove the company to embark on a major project to overhaul its storage environment. 

Today, Sky Research stores all its informationGIS data, developers files, and its own administrative informationon storage area network (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS) running on a NetApp FAS3020. These storage systems store in excess of 10TB of data: approximately 2TB of processed imagery in an Oracle database, 4TB of raw project data in flat files, and 4TB of corporate data in Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server.

Whether the data comes in through CIFS or NFS/Oracle, it all goes to one place: Sky Researchs storage system. After analysts complete their work, they store the final products in the Oracle 10g database. Sky Research uses Web-based mapping applications to allow clients and project stakeholders access to these images and reports.  
Recently the IT Director sent a NetApp FAS2020 out into the field, so that teams on the ground could run their analysis and produce maps in near-real time for an urgent application. The teams needed to use both Linux and Windows, and since the storage system supports both NFS and CIFS, they didnt have to shuffle data around to allow shared access.

Sky Researchs team often faces massive influxes of data: Ground-based sensors generate anywhere from tens to hundreds of MB each day, and airborne sensors pull in about 1GB or more of data per day. A weeklong airborne mission may return with over 100GB of data. Some sensors record data onto removable hard drives; personnel then swap these into workstations on Skys LAN and copy the data to its storage system  via CIFS. Other sensor data is uploaded directly to Skys Oracle Database using custom tools developed in house. Data also comes to the storage system as CIFS flat files through large USB hard drives. 
While Sky has three main officesin Colorado, Vancouver, BC, and Oregonand remote locations in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, it keeps and processes all of its data at Skys Oregon headquarters. Analysts access the data with high-end, multi-CPU workstations with up to16GB of RAM, and process it using specialized software from ESRI, Geosoft, Mathworks, and others. Sky stores all this informationGIS data, developers files, and its own administrative informationon storage-attached network (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS) running on a NetApp FAS3020. The IT team estimates that the NetApp systems store in excess of 10TB of data: approximately 2TB of processed imagery in the Oracle Database, 4TB of raw project data in flat files, and 4TB of corporate data in Microsoft Exchange and MS SQL Server. After analysts complete their work, they store the final products in the Oracle10g database. Sky uses Web-based mapping applications to allow clients and project stakeholders access to these images and reports.
For high availability and business continuity, SnapMirror copies data volumes from Skys primary FAS3020 to its secondary FAS3020 every hour. The business requirement is not to lose more than a days worth of data, so this system designwhich makes it unlikely that Sky will lose more than  an hour of datamore than meets Skys needs. Sky backs up its data regularly, running scripts that take Snapshot copies. Sky keeps the majority of its data on  disk, and it archives backup copies to tape libraries once a week.

Yes

Yes

The new storage solution enables Sky to serve its customers efficiently, while minimizing the time and resources devoted to managing storage. As a result, analysts and customers dont have to think about how or where the data is being storedits always readily available to them. They can just focus on the data, not on IT issues. Ensuring reliability is easy now. In the unlikely event that a drive fails, the failed drive can be easily swapped out. The new storage solution has also proven highly cost-effective. The flexibility built into products enables Sky to use NFS and FC drives for Oracle, iSCSI for SQL Server and Exchange, and CIFS for flat files.  Sky can minimize its use of pricey FC and maximize its use of lower-cost, more flexible Ethernet.
Sky also conserves its resources by using flexible volumes to reduce the amount of unused space allocated to volumes. With Skys previous solution, the team would sometimes have 500GB of space available on one server, but would need it on another serverand there would be no way to access it. With the new storage infrastructure, physical location of storage space is a non-issue. Adding to cost savings, Sky doesnt even need a dedicated storage administrator for its storage system, which saves the company about $70,000 annually plus benefits. What with ease of administration, flexibility, and greater utilization, the new storage solution has slashed Skys cost of data storage by 65%, from $17/GB to $6/GB. 

Sky Research conducts the majority of work for the Army Corp of Engineers, helping the organization ensure that active and formerly used military sites are free of dangerous UXOs. The companys website sites a number of examples where UXOs from formerly remote military sites have been found in what are now residential neighborhoods. For example, the team is now working with the Army Corp of Engineers on a former military site to determine if there are any UXOs so that the organization can remove any munitions before the land is sold to a developer. Other examples include:
Help detect live ammunition near a middle school in Orange County
	Clean up of Edwards Air Force Base in California
	Clean up popular beach on the Jersey Shore
	Clean up Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico 
The following is a quote from one of Sky Researchs large customers: 
Once again, this is an outstanding product...make sure everyone who had
a part in it knows that. Sky Research's capability and ability to do things like this is a key
element of the ongoing relationship with my office - keep it up.

Sky Research gathers a staggering amount of raw data from its airborne and ground-based systems. Then its up to the IT team to make sure all that raw data is available for analysis. After the analysts have processed the data and created maps, the team ensures that Skys customerssuch as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of Defense, and NASAcan quickly and reliably access those maps to guide their remediation efforts. There are only a few customers for Skys services, but theyre big, and their projects can be huge. If a major project comes in, Sky might need to double its size virtually overnight, adding technical fieldwork experts and data analysts. During the past five years, Sky has grown from 35 employees to 80, and from a storage capacity of 1TB to 48TB. Skys storage environment has made it much easier for the company to manage and store these large influxes of data, helping the company serve its customers and continue to rapidly grow.

As a small and growing company, the IT team was challenged with securing budget to upgrade its storage system. The team was also challenged with finding a scalable, enterprise, solution that was affordable. Because the NetApp solution is flexible and can be easily expanded, the Sky Research team could start out with a small deployment that fit the companys needs and budget, but expand the solution as the company grew.

When it came time to replace the companys direct attached storage environment with an enterprise storage solution, the IT team was challenged with justifying the expense. At the time, the technology investment was very significant for the company. The IT team spent time with the executive team to explain the benefits of implementing a new storage solution. In addition, NetApp let the company demo the storage solution for a month so that the executive team could see the benefits of the new solution first hand.

Exceeded

The statistics are staggering:
	More than 200,000 square kilometers of the worlds surface is contaminated with landmines.  
	An estimated 80 million landmines are still buried worldwide. 
	It is now estimated that 54 countries have approximately 180 million antipersonnel mines stockpiled. 
	Every 28 minutes someone steps on a landmine.  Over 6,500 new casualties were identified in 2004.   This number does not include the thousands of casualties that go unreported when victims are killed or injured in remote areas, away from assistance and any means of communication.  In reality, landmines kill or injure approximately 18,000 people every year.
Sky Research helps develop tools that can be used to detect explosive devices in conflict areas  saving lives in the process. In addition, the company has given back to the educational community, teaming with University students to solve problems with global implications. For example, Sky Research worked with University Mathematics students from the US, Canada, and Mexico to try to develop a model to predict how unexploded ordnance reacts to the shock of impact. 10 to 20 per cent of all pieces of ordnance malfunction on impact and don't explode, burying themselves in the ground and leaving behind dangerous relics from conflicts or military training. They're a troubling problem in current and former war zones such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Bosnia, says Billings, but it's also an issue in North America, where former military training grounds are sometimes abandoned and turned into residential or commercial developments. If the students are able to solve Sky Research's problem, it will make it much easier to separate bombs and missiles from harmless horseshoe.
The new storage solution enables Sky to serve its customers efficiently, while minimizing the time and resources devoted to managing storage.

The IT team embraced the new solution immediately. Since the initial implementation, any new members of the IT team have also been quick to embrace the new storage solution, once they understand it. While the rest of the Sky Research team doesnt understand the intricacies of the companys storage environment, they are pleased with the fact that they have an IT environment that enables them to effectively do their jobs.