COPERNICUS SENTINELS PROGRAM: WITH EXPRIVIA AND SONY, DATA ON THE HEALTH OF PLANET EARTH IS SAFE FOR 100 YEARS
The data storage service from the Copernicus Sentinels program satellites has started: for the first time in Europe, optical technology-based media will be used to keep the data made available by the European space agency for many decades.
Exprivia, in partnership with SONY, will provide for the next 18 months the long term data storage service from satellites in orbit as part of the Copernicus Sentinels program created by the European Union and ESA (European Space Agency).
The international public tender announced by ESA and won by Exprivia concerns the Long Term Data Archive Service (LTA) system, for the storage of data from the pairs of 'Sentinel 1, 2 and 3' satellites that monitor the terrestrial and marine environment, land surfaces and their movements, providing information on pollution, climate change and ecosystems, as well as mapping for humanitarian support in crisis situations.
The revolutionary archiving system of "raw" data - captured directly from the satellite - will use for the first time in Europe the new ODA GEN3 optical media, the third generation of Sony's Optical Disc Archive technology, a system aimed at the long-term archiving segment term for Big Data storage. Thanks to ODA, for the next 100 years, in fact, an immense amount of information (more than 8 Peta Bytes at the end of 2021) coming from the observation and monitoring of the Earth, will be stored in more performing and durable devices than traditional magnetic media. Once processed at higher levels, the data will be available free of charge to citizens, public and private bodies (including research institutes, military or government authorities) and authorized companies who request it.
The LTA service, developed for the first time in the Aerospace market on optical technology and by an Italian company, records a daily flow of approximately one Terabyte (TB) of data per satellite from European "acquisition-and-processing" centres , extracts the metadata and stores it online, near-line and off-line. The solution proposed by Exprivia will allow data to be catalogued, checked and indexed, guaranteeing its conservation and future retrieval. It is also the first time that ESA entrusts data storage to an external company that will ensure the timely and accurate storage of the information collected, as well as periodically monitoring their accessibility.
“The raw data acquired by Copernicus satellites - says Roberto Medri, Head of Digital Factory, Defence & Aerospace of Exprivia - are the basis of all the information coming from our planet and constitute an heritage of fundamental importance. The solution conceived by Exprivia, combined with Sony's ODA technology, guarantees reliability and safety, contributing to the knowledge of the environmental, terrestrial, meteorological and atmospheric phenomena of our planet for the next decades. A new approach that will make information useful for the protection of the Earth available free of charge to future generations. This technology, from space, becomes now available for other contexts in the IT world, for the protection of heterogeneous databases in markets such as Industry, Healthcare, Public Administration and Banking”.
Sony has been involved with the prestigious project team to contribute to an innovative and data security approach.
"In 2012 Sony R&D introduced Optical Disc Archive (ODA) for long-term data archiving as a result of more than 30 years of research and development" - says Benito Manlio Mari, Sony Country Sales Manager Professional Solutions Europe. "The ODA solution, based on optical technology, immediately gained wide acceptance from the market, thanks to a series of exclusive features, such as extremely high reliability, protection strategies and direct access to data".
In its evolutionary path, ODA has reached the third generation, offering a capacity of 5.5 TB in W.O.R.M. allowing reading at speeds up to 3Gbps and writing up to 1.5Gbps.
Valter Corda, Product Manager of Sony Professional Solutions Europe, declares: “ODA is able to preserve the stored data for 100 years, offers a high resistance to environmental agents and, compared to other physical media, ensures the highest expectation of reproducibility. related to the generational evolutions of optical technologies. Furthermore, with ODA the reading of the data is not subject to the obligation of migration to new generation platforms, thus proposing a significant reduction in operating costs compared to solutions based on magnetic tape or HDD."
Alfredo Donadei, Sales Manager of Sony Professional Solutions Europe, adds: “Sony Professional's acknowledgment goes to Exprivia for the important role played not only for the technological adoption aspect, achieved through evident emphasis on the development of the application integration of the ODA system, but also for the components linked to the value of environmental sustainability which is part of Sony's identity ".
In addition to SONY, Retelit collaborate as strategic partners with Exprivia, for the Cloud infrastructure on which to process the large amount of data to be archived, and Mandarin | Open Hub Med (local telco operator) which manages colocation services, IP Transit and Peering provided at the OpenHubMed Data Center (open Exchange and Neutral Access Point).
Disclaimer
The views expressed herein cannot in any way be construed as an official opinion of the European Space Agency or the European Union.
Credit
Source images attached to the press release: ESA, Pierre Carril.