STORAGE

Isilon Systems, the premier provider of intelligent clustered storage, today announced that GlobeXplorer LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Stewart Information Services, has selected Isilon's award-winning Isilon IQ clustered storage systems to collect, store and manage the world's largest and fastest-growing commercial library of maps and aerial and satellite imagery. GlobeXplorer has provided its flexible subscription-based services to leading Internet portals such as Mapquest.com, Maps.com, National Geographic, ADT, real-estate companies, and U.S. Government agencies that include the Environmental Protection Agency, the Census Bureau and the Lawrence Livermore National Lab. By combining advanced maps from a diverse set of sources with satellite and aerial imagery, GlobeXplorer allows users to replace costly, time-consuming onsite visits and use of paper maps with the simplicity and power of mouse clicks. To support its rapidly growing library and increasing image resolutions, the company required a highly scalable storage solution that could be easily integrated into its environment and deliver unparalleled reliability, performance and value. Isilon IQ clustered storage enables GlobeXplorer to continually expand its collection, which today totals more than 500 Terabytes of data. "GlobeXplorer provides its customers with the most detailed, affordable and accurate views of the planet so that our customers have the information they need to make better and faster decisions," said Rob Shanks, president of GlobeXplorer LLC. "Managing reference information is a core component of our business and Isilon's clustered storage solutions allow us to revolutionize the services we provide to our customers while significantly cutting the costs associated with storing our extremely large and rapidly growing data sets." A technology leader and early pioneer of web services, GlobeXplorer provides seamless, rights-managed access to a wide array of digital maps, land records, satellite imagery and aerial fly-overs -- which today are so detailed they can alert a potential homebuyer to missing rooftop shingles. To support their rapidly growing library and ever increasing image resolutions, GlobeXplorer required a highly scalable storage solution that could be easily integrated into its environment and deliver unparalleled reliability, performance and value. With GlobeXplorer, customers and their end-users can quickly view geographic areas and overlay relevant information such as flood plain data, property lines and detailed visual representations. With its syndicated service and plethora of information sources, GlobeXplorer is enabling a more detailed and richer view of geographical data than would be possible with traditional resources. "The advanced satellite imagery and mapping services offered by GlobeXplorer has revolutionized the way people can access and immediately view geographically referenced information," said Brett Goodwin, vice president of marketing and business development for Isilon Systems. "Isilon IQ and our OneFS distributed file system software allows GlobeXplorer to ingest, manage and share more data via its advanced web services than ever before." The sheer size of GlobeXplorer's collection, combined with the rate of new additions, strained its traditional storage systems and forced administrators to navigate a complicated maze in order to modify or expand capacity and performance. By creating a single, modular and expandable pool of networked storage, Isilon IQ enables organizations to reliably add tens, hundreds, or even thousands of terabytes of storage -- dramatically reducing both capital acquisition and ongoing IT management costs. Unlike most traditional storage systems, which require costly custom hardware that is delivered in complex, monolithic architectures, the Isilon IQ family of clustered storage systems offers unmatched mission-critical performance in a modular form factor that uses intelligent software coupled with industry standard hardware. Recently, Isilon also announced the next generation of its award-winning Isilon IQ family of clustered storage systems -- the Isilon IQ 1920, 3000 and 4800 -- powered by the latest version of Isilon's award-winning OneFS distributed file system software. Isilon IQ is the first clustered storage system to offer low-latency InfiniBand for intracluster communication, scale to more than 150 terabytes of capacity and deliver up to three gigabytes/second of total throughput from a single file system.