Atlantic specializes in providing remote sensing, surveying, and consulting services.
Atlantic’s IT organization takes a proactive approach to supporting the needs of the growing company. “Our deliverable as a company is data. We deliver geospatial data, lidar data, photogrammetric data, and all of that has to be hosted somewhere,” said Ben Hayes, Senior Systems Architect at Atlantic. “Our job in IT is to make sure that the data is always available and that our storage is always scaling.“
With large file formats – such as uncompressible, high-resolution aerial imaging data, the Atlantic team has very specific storage needs. “We need lots of space, high IOPS, low latency, and the ability to scale,” said Hayes. “When you’re looking at solutions for our requirements, there are only a few companies for us to consider.”
“Our clients have a very diverse set of needs,” said CEO Brian Mayfield. ”They’re looking for solutions and geographic-enabled data that helps them solve problems. Those problems could be sea level-rise studies, flood map determination, forest inventories – we have a wide variety of needs we support.”
These are the factors that led the Atlantic team to evaluate Qumulo. After deploying Qumulo’s file data platform, the company saw the following benefits to its business:
Peace of mind
“Qumulo helps take a lot of the stress that comes with storage management and gives me the peace of mind that we have a good solution in place that’s going to do what we want, and is heavily monitored not only by us, but by Qumulo support. And if there are any problems, Qumulo will respond extremely quickly and they’ll send somebody out if we need them to,” said Hayes.
The visibility also allows Hayes to have open conversations with his team about their activity within the system. Hayes uses the “capacity trends” dashboard to pinpoint unexpected activity openly with the team so they can identify where problems are arising. If they see an unexpected spike or decline, they can discuss as a team to get to the root cause of the activity before it becomes a bigger issue.
Long-term investment & customer partnership
The easy access to experts, and proactive communication from the Qumulo team was a big selling point for Atlantic and continues to impress them as they continue the partnership longer term.
“One of the exciting things about working with Qumulo for us is having the ability to chat directly with the engineering team on Slack. You don’t have to go on with this long duration of ‘press one, press two,’ – you just open Slack, post your question, and within seconds you could have two, three or 10 well-seasoned engineers responding to our questions,” said Mayfield. “And these are the people who develop the products, and support companies like ours.”
Cost-effectively scales to meet future capacity and performance requirements
“In the past, so much of our time revolved around managing storage and managing problems with the storage, whether it was issues from maxing out hard drive capabilities, or running out of space, or having to archive the data quicker,” said Hayes.
Performance is another key concern for the Atlantic team, and Qumulo has been holding up to the task. “Software’s not choking anymore, we’re able to keep data for slightly longer, we’re able to get projects out quicker,” said Hayes.
Automation & control
“Qumulo provides awesome analytics, and all of those analytics are in real-time. But we required a little bit more in-depth analytics,” said Hayes. The Atlantic team was looking for more specific historical data than the real-time analytics or snapshots feature offered. In order to get the specific analytics Hayes was looking for, he looked to Qumulo’s API and customer success team to bridge the gaps he identified.
Through the Slack channel, he was connected with Qumulo’s data visualization expert. Together, they figured out a way Hayes would be able to build his own dashboard utilizing the API that delivered the exact information he was looking for.
The added functionality allowed Hayes to look at any point in time to investigate activity within his file system. As problems arise, that visibility offers his team exactly what they need to keep operations moving smoothly and decrease bottlenecks.
As Atlantic continues to scale its operations, and as the technology becomes increasingly advanced, their data storage needs will continue to increase. “Finding solutions that allow us to scale quickly without adding a lot more people are key. And Qumulo is certainly a part of our solution for that,” said Mayfield.
Learn More
Read the full case study about Atlantic here to learn more about how Qumulo was able to help enable innovation for the company. And watch this video case study about Atlantic’s Data Journey with Qumulo.
Hear directly from Atlantic’s Senior Systems Architect Ben Hayes in this on-demand webinar, where he provided his perspective on why Atlantic upgraded from Isilon to Qumulo.
Contact us if you’d like to set up a meeting or request a demo. And subscribe to our blog for more helpful best practices and resources!
