MDA Federal, Inc.

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For nearly 10 years, MDA Federal has relied on Sun to provide the technology foundation on which the company’s remote-sensing, image-processing, and GIS tools are built. With these tools, MDA’s staff of foresters, agronomists, ecologists, wildlife biologists, geologists, meteorologists, and other scientists can better understand the Earth’s natural resources and monitor the global environment.

“We’ve now mapped the globe three times, and our storage architecture from Sun was the key that enabled us to do it so efficiently,” says Christopher Peterson, Vice President of Information Technology and Chief Technology Officer at MDA Federal. The company’s shared-file and storage area management (SAM) system is based on Sun StorageTek QFS and SAM software. Peterson manages the system himself so that the IT department’s other three staff members can focus on their specialized tasks. “It’s pretty much self-maintaining,” he adds. “I spend only about a tenth of my time on SAM maintenance. Without the SAM system, we would need another full-time IT resource.”

A Sun Fire T2000 server functions as a network attached storage (NAS) head for the company’s Windows users who access the file system through Samba open-source software. “The T2000 offers a processor that doesn’t generate much heat but has the ability to run many threads,” says Peterson. Employees routinely use the system to work with satellite images ranging from 500-megabyte photos to 6-gigabyte mosaics delivered over the company’s 10-Gbps network. MDA Federal’s image archive is 2.2 petabytes, most of which is stored on tape; 100 terabytes are available on disk for immediate access.

Additionally, MDA Federal uses Sun Fire V880 servers for image processing, Sun Fire V240 servers for Web-tier and FTP functions, and a Sun Fire V20z server for email. Half of the company’s servers run the Solaris 10 Operating System, and the remainder run Solaris 9 OS, UNIX, Linux, or Windows. The company’s Sun hardware is backed by a SunSpectrum Silver Service Plan.

MDA Federal trusts its Sun SAM system to continually and automatically archive mission-critical information. “We’ve never had a problem recovering data,” says Peterson. “I have 100-percent confidence in the system. Our scientists don’t have to be involved with managing their data; all they have to do is access it, and the system takes care of managing it for them. Also, because our people don’t have to worry about making mistakes, such as accidentally deleting or corrupting files, they are more inclined to experiment with their data.”

Experimenting with the data has led to improved services, — for example, MDA Federal’s upcoming Correlated Land Change (CLC) system that analyzes satellite images and creates models of how land cover changes over time. These models can be used to study everything from the effects of climate change to large-scale civil engineering projects but they cost just pennies per square kilometer. “CLC will save several hundred labor hours compared to manually analyzing images,” says Peterson. “It’s a direct spinoff of our other global data offerings, and we attribute the success of all of them to our Sun SAM system.”