LTA Service

The ESA Long-Term Archive is a place where Earth observation data is stored under the European Copernicus Earth observation program. The platform collects data from satellites, describing various parameters related to phenomena on our planet.

LTA provides access to archival data in a cloud that is used by scientists, researchers and public administration officials e.g. for the implementation of projects in scope of marine and land ecosystems analysis, environmental protection, atmosphere, climate change, crisis management and security.

– Long Term Archive is another project that we are carrying out for the European Space Agency. Previous ones relate to online platforms that collect Earth observation data and enable its analysis and processing in a cloud infrastructure, says Przemysław Mujta, Sales Support Director at CloudFerro, and he further explains: – LTA is a project that ensures unified and standardized access to all data from the Sentinel satellites, including archival data. Only an efficient and flexible computing cloud is able to meet this considerable challenge of storing 50 PB of data that is constantly growing and time enabling open access to historical Earth observation data. Importantly, the service provided by CloudFerro ensures a full compliance with the required ESA standards along with full, immediate availability of archived data practically in real time.

Creating a powerful archive of Earth observation data is associated with many challenges: a constant increase in the volume of information, a growing number of users and the use of innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence or machine learning for big data analysis.

The scope of CloudFerro's service for ESA includes comprehensive implementation and execution of archive services, as well as the provision of an immediate online access to the archived ESA data (nearly in real time, in compliance with ESA standards), which can be searched and generated using REST API. The cloud infrastructure provided by CloudFerro is based on an open source software – OpenStack and CEPH, which gives a great flexibility and scalability based on high-capacity hard drives and data replication schemes that are transparent to the client, ensuring full security of the collected data.

CloudFerro provides an innovative technology based on the exclusive use of disk storage instead of a traditional tape library or a hybrid solution. This kind of solution, based solely on disks, is definitely more efficient than existing technologies used for data archiving, easy to implement, cost-competitive and provides a high-performance access to the entire data archive – internal tests have confirmed the ability of providing up to 2PB of data per day.