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SATELLITE CENTRE PLAYS CRUCIAL ROLE IN TIMES OF CRISIS

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 6, Issue 2 - March 2006
 

When the Indian Ocean tsunami struck in December 2004, the European Union Satellite Centre had a major role to play in the aftermath when it came to the EU determining the worst-hit areas and planning how best to respond with aid. Archive and current imagery from the EUSC was critical in this process
 

Located in Torrejón, near Madrid, in Spain, the European Union Satellite Centre (EUSC) is responsible for providing geographical information useful to the European Union in preventing conflicts, in contributing to peace-keeping and in delivering aid in cases of natural or human-caused disasters.

To this end, the EUSC is dedicated to the production of geographical information derived primarily from analysis of images of the earth taken from space. It also conducts research and development projects, and carries out training activities for expert personnel in the fields of digital geographic information systems and imagery analysis.

Lest it be thought that satellite imagery for these purposes is the observational equivalent of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, the EUSC was recently called upon in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster in December 2004, where it was required to support the European Union's and Member States' aid missions. The EU used information provided by the EUSC to determine the worst-hit areas and to plan how best to respond with aid. Archive and current imagery from the EUSC was critical in providing sufficient fast and accurate information to enable the EU's emergency response.

However, such events are mercifully rare and, day-to-day, the primary function of the EUSC is to collect and interpret satellite images from around the world, in preparation for crisis management and to support on-going CFSP operations.

Juan Giner is head of the technical division of the EUSC, responsible for the IT systems in use at the centre. He explains how satellite imaging has changed in recent years. "In 1993, a Spot satellite image was something like 50MB in size, while today it's anything from 700MB to 1GB or even more. That works out as a compounded average increase
in file size of about 30 per cent per year per raw image."

Many images may be used as input data to create a final, processed image, useful to humans, known within the centre as a 'final product'. Giner continues: "From 1993 to 2001, we saw our storage requirement just for final products grow by 300 per cent, due to the increase in image size. On top of that, between 1993 and 2002, there has been an additional average annual increase of about 10 per cent for our final product data, for operational reasons. So storage is a huge issue for us."

For the EUSC, storage is a massive challenge not only for the sheer volume of its data. Every organisation accepts that its data is its lifeblood and yet, compliance reasons aside, most organisations would usually agree that it is current data that's most critical. Not so for the EUSC, for which all data is critical. The reason for this is that much of the EUSC's work involves determining changes in images over significant periods of time, often several years.

As a result, protecting its data is one of the highest priorities in the EUSC's data centre. "It's hard to think of many things more important than protecting our operational data set," says Giner. "Without it, we would be unable to perform the only functions that we're authorised and funded to do. It is genuinely mission-critical."

Since its creation, the EUSC had used one particular solution to provide its backup and restore capability. However, by the end of 2001, it was experiencing problems that were difficult to resolve, it says. So, in 2002, the EUSC determined to rectify the situation.

Key criteria for a new solution included good integration with the existing EUSC Exabyte tape library, provision of full and advanced backup, restore and archive functions, ease of use and good support from the vendor in Spain to prevent any problems from piling up. Several potential solutions met these criteria, but there were two additional factors that finally swung the decision in favour of Atempo's Time Navigator data protection solution. First, there was a need to be able to navigate backwards through generations of backups - a key feature of Time Navigator, which spawned its name. Secondly, an EUSC staff member reported positive feedback from previous experience of Time Navigator.

"The personal recommendation of one of the IT staff was important, yes," says Giner. "Because we collect and analyse a tremendous number of images, we have to have faith in our solution and experience counts. We've chosen Time Navigator for its high performance, ease of use and best-in-class support, and for the fact that these attributes were proven to us. We also got the local support that we missed previously, and Atempo's Professional Services division did a great job of defining the specifications for our archiving solution."

The EUSC collects an average of four terabytes of backup data every quarter, and uses a significant volume of geog- raphical, satellite and aerial image data on a daily basis. Time Navigator is used to conduct a full backup every two weeks and several incremental backups are executed daily.

Time Navigator is a fully heterogeneous solution, which is essential at the EUSC because its infrastructure comprises a variety of manufacturers' solutions and platforms. Its equipment includes a Sun NFS server, running Solaris and home to an Oracle database, plus plenty of high-end Sun workstations. Additionally, there are numerous PCs, running Microsoft Windows 2000 and XP. Data is backed up to a Sun-StorageTek L180 LT02 tape library, with four drives.

"We can choose whatever equipment we want to expand or update our infrastructure," confirms Giner. "Using Time Navigator does not constrain our future choices; in fact, if anything, it has the opposite result and we're confident we can attach anything we like to the network and its data will still be protected."

If remote imaging technology continues to improve at the same rate as it has done in the last decade, and the EUSC's storage requirements continue to grow, then Time Navigator's 'protect everything' capability is likely to prove very important.
For more information on EUSC, visit www.eusc.org