Comments on: The ArcGIS Online Data Appliance

By: J Wallis

J Wallis — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 14:04:19 +0000

Image Server is getting put into AGS anyways….with ArcIMS going away soon Customers will need a way to serve up large seamless rasters and the way AGS currently handles it doesn’t work well. It seems that the longer you wait the more likely you are to get cool products like AGS and Image Server for “free” just for keeping your maintenance up to date.

I’m still waiting on a new and improved metadata server solution. The current ArcIMS solution is junk. I think it is the only thing keeping ESRI from dumping ArcIMS altogether.

By: Cellulose

Cellulose — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 16:10:33 +0000

Tim–

You’re probably right… though I think Image Server is filling a gap that SDE Raster was never designed to fill, but is frequently used to fill it. Either way, we won’t see ESRI pushing the SDE raster very hard anymore.

If anything, they’ll probably push the FGDB raster harder than the SDE raster.

By: Tim Maddle

Tim Maddle — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 03:03:48 +0000

Cellulose, I would argue that ImageServer, in particular, was designed specifically as an SDE Raster “killer”. I know that in my personal case, I was looking forward to ImageServer specifically for that purpose, to be rid of this danged process of creating SDE raster catalogs and mosaics. ImageServer might be expensive to scale up for large deployments, but that seems to be the case with AGS, in general.

Alas, Image Server was not in the budget. My little MapServer tool isn’t too bad. It’s not quite as fast as I would like, but I’ve been testing with the aerials on a USB drive, which has to hurt performance.

By: Cellulose

Cellulose — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:15:22 +0000

I think the SDE Raster is dying, but not due to either of those.

The Appliance is a turn-key solution for serving up pre-built imagery. ArcSDE would/could still be used for custom imagery, etc. AFAIK, they won’t sell you the appliance and load your imagery on it.

Image Server is designed to reduce the lag time between image acquisition and delivery. It’s more expensive to scale up or to get the hardware for big deployments.

I suspect the advent of the Map Cache and image tiling on the server-side will kill the SDE Raster.

By: Tim Maddle

Tim Maddle — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 16:09:36 +0000

Great, I’m sure we’d all like a first-hand account of the capabilities of the appliance. For those of us without the big budget, I’m pretty sure that MapServer can be setup to be an excellent basic image server, and I’m working on that project now.

Based on the development of Image Server (which will be a part of AGS in 9.3, not a separate product) and this data appliance, does it seem to any else that ESRI is signaling the end of the idea of storing rasters in the SDE?

By: J Wallis

J Wallis — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 19:32:15 +0000

sounds like I need to contact my ESRI rep. They apparently have thought of everything.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 03:42:08 +0000

@DEWright:
Looks like the update is based off what you buy:

Data Updatesâ€”If ArcGIS Data Appliance Renewal fees are purchased, licensed data collections are updated on an annual basis for Standard Renewal and a semiannual basis for Premium Renewal and delivered on disk drives to be replaced and installed by the user in the ArcGIS Data Appliance.

By: J Wallis

J Wallis — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 17:35:06 +0000

Well, I know I do…so I would be a target customer.

By: Cellulose

Cellulose — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 16:45:11 +0000

Other people use GIS? From the way ESRI and Google market to government customers, you’d think they were the only people who exist.

I’m still skeptical of the network downloads… I mean how many organizations have a big, fat OC48 connection to a backbone provider anyway?

By: J Wallis

J Wallis — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 16:29:54 +0000

Thank goodness other people besides the government use GIS.

A secure link via exchanged tokens to a central distribution point is acceptable. It is no different than what we use to pull across aggregated searches to our Metacarta appliance.

I’d still accept a reasonable amount of downtime if they offered a physical swap out service, but being able to suck down and integrate ad hoc imagery updates (securely) will be the killer app.

a single entity reaching out and getting updates while all end users point at the intranet box is very acceptable in most organizations.