Pictometry bundles their image libraries with AberNAS

"We are a startup company, just passing our 10^th year from making our first delivery in 2001, and it felt like we were dealing with ‘one of our own’ – a company that was responsive and nimble.” –Dave Finger, VP Customer Technical Services Pictometry International

 Challenge

Pictometry International specializes in taking aerial images and selling them to their clients in a package they call an image library. These image libraries can range from 50 gigabytes to 4 terabytes or even larger, and deploying Pictometry’s image libraries often overwhelms their clients’ servers. Pictometry soon realized that they needed a large storage device for enterprise environments, which could not only deliver their data but that could also host it at their customer’s site. The device had to be reliable and needed multiple failover points.

Aberdeen’s Recommendation

Because Pictometry was looking for a network attached device, Aberdeen knew its NAS would meet their customer’s needs. It needed to stand on its own, without the host server, and it needed to be able to be accessed directly from workstations without necessitating upgrades to Pictometry’s existing network.

Whereas Aberdeen’s competitors would have recommended something pricier – for example, a small scale SAN with features that would look impressive on paper – Aberdeen delved into the customer’s true needs to ensure that those needs were met and that they also weren’t wasting their money on features that they would never use.

Implementation

Before finding Aberdeen, Pictometry had been using a consumer level single drive product to deliver their data, making them look unprofessional in their customers’ eyes. Aberdeen’s NAS solution is essentially a turkey product, and was up and running for Pictometry in a matter of minutes. They started small, by ordering one or two units at a time, but once they saw that the product satisfied the need for their market perfectly, those orders quickly grew to up to 45 units at a time.

Results

By combining their product with Aberdeen’s, Pictometry was able to market it as a complete solution for their clients. Each customer that has an AberNAS system deployed has been quite pleased, and not once has a Pictometry customer reported that the AberNAS was an inadequate solution to deploy their image libraries.

Not only has the AberNAS satisfied Pictometry’s storage needs, but it has the added benefit of being able to be used as a platform for Self-Hosting. After that realization, Pictometry even bought two AberNAS units for internal development and testing use. They have also twice taken them to their annual User Conference and shown them to customers that are interested in Self-Hosting. The Pictometry Engineering department uses their AberNAS daily as a staging platform to test Self-Hosting and POL.