Everything in space, from rockets to satellites, generates huge volumes of data. Every hour of every day, organizations like NASA collect millions of data points from their missions. In 2020 alone, there were 2,666 operational satellites in orbit, each capturing thousands upon thousands of terabytes of data daily, adding up to petabytes per year.
To put this into perspective, 1 petabyte is 1,000 terabytes, and 1 terabyte is about 1,000 gigabytes, which is enough storage for about 250 full-length movies. It is estimated that in 2030 some 50,000 satellites will cross our night sky. The amount of aerospace data that needs to be stored, managed and protected is immense and growing.
Since storage is the foundation on which this vast amount of information is accessed and analyzed, it has a direct impact on the usefulness of the data. Simply, without it it is not possible to obtain information. Take advantage of the data that enters and leaves the space rYou want innovative storage solutions that can meet the needs and solve the challenges of meteoric data growth..
Object storage is fundamentally and uniquely designed to accommodate huge amounts of unstructured data. And because it’s built on scalable cloud principles, it can scale to petabytes, exabytes, and beyond.
We partner with organizations across the aerospace and aviation ecosystem to store, protect and harness the vast amounts of data they need for everything from weather forecasting to searching for distant galaxies. For example, we can talk about data storage modernization for the French government space agency that we are helping to secure and store their space data with a new storage solution.
The goal is to modernize CNES’s storage infrastructure to make better use of the huge volumes of data coming from its satellites, including making it easier, safer and faster for users to access data collection and archives. These data is priceless. Suppose an event such as a solar flare is captured: these are images that cannot be replaced. Information must be stored securely but accessible. And that also means having the right permissions so only the right people can access it.
For CNES (known in English as the National Center for Space Studies), it is essential to have huge amounts of hot and cold storage, they need access to rights with a very precise granularity.
Object storage not only meets these requirements, but also offers well-defined APIs and workflows for moving data between storage tiers. REST-based APIs offer significant benefits for sharing data with remote sites and defining persistent Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) that will accompany the images for as long as they are stored, regardless of the media they are on, be it flash media, disk, or tape. A URI is a sequence of characters that identifies a physical resource usually (but not always) connected to the Internet and distinguishes one resource from another.
The solution offered is a key element of a large-scale content repository for the agency, which allows the storage and sharing of satellite images between international agencies.
Making rapidly growing satellite imagery data secure and accessible
The global market for commercial satellite imagery is skyrocketing. With a compound annual growth rate of nearly 12%, analysts expect it to reach a valuation of $5.42 billion by 2026. Satellites capture images of the Earth and use them for a variety of commercial purposes, from mapping and acquisition to disaster management, urban planning and development, etc.
For the most part, commercial satellite imagery companies sell these images to governments for important applications such as environmental protection, agriculture, forestry, and urban and rural development. Of course, satellite images are also essential for the services we use on a daily basis, such as Google and Apple Maps. And, as you can imagine, these are data-intensive images: some companies collect up to 100 terabytes per day or moreyes Images should be processed into usable formats and cataloged in a searchable way for delivery to users. This need poses a significant data storage challenge.
Another interesting example is our collaboration with the German Earth Observation Center (EOC) to solve the organizational challenge of exponential data growth. We help them host their high-definition satellite imagery archive, their photogrammetry and image analysis department (more than six million files – many of them larger than a terabyte) – which are consulted from 40 client workstations at a time. time. The needs of the organization grow with each mission and, with them, its valuable archives safe and accessible for its investigation teams.
Moving closer to the atmosphere, aircraft manufacturers are also grappling with their own big data storage needs. These companies must manage massive amounts of data, and this information must be stored indefinitely. What does “massive amounts of data” mean in this context? For example, it is estimated that an average commercial aircraft generates up to 20 terabytes of engine information per hour.
Data generated by newer aircraft can be used for everything from optimizing fuel consumption and crew deployment, to anticipating when parts will need to be maintained or replaced, and even potentially reducing air congestion. But airlines and aircraft manufacturers not only need to store data securely, they also need a better way to find and access it.
We work with companies in this sector – including a major European aerospace multinational – to provide them with solutions for managing petabyte-scale data on premises and in the cloud.
Cloud storage: to infinity and beyond!
Data storage needs will continue to grow as aerospace technology becomes more sophisticated, more missions are launched and new companies enter the industry.
To drive innovation and stay competitive, IT leaders working in these fast-growing fields are investing in highly secure, infinitely scalable solutions to maximize the potential of their mission-critical data—data that affects our daily lives and that they may ultimately shape the future of human life on Earth and beyond.
Signed: Israel Serrano, head of Scality for Spain and southern Europe
