Manging and archiving mission-critical geospatial intelligence data

Specialised in humanitarian aid missions and peacekeeping missions such as recovery from natural disaster or evacuation operations, SatCen is well-known for its expertise in GEOspatial INTelligence, a discipline that comprises the exploitation and analysis of imagery and geospatial information to describe, assess, and visually depict physical features and geographically referenced activities on the Earth. On a daily basis, SatCen acquires high resolution satellite images from different providers (Spot Image, Ikonos, Skymed). These images, ranging from 350Mb to several gigabytes each, are then processed by the agency’s experts using leading GIS applications like ArcGis, Erdas or PCI, before being delivered to customers for further exploitation and analysis.

"On a typical day, we order 4 new satellite images from different sources which are then analysed and processed by our team. With higher and higher resolution images, as well as the introduction of video formats, it was crucial for SatCen to deploy a powerful and scalable solution to manage and archive the geospatial data we acquire and process on a daily basis. This is why we turned to StorNext 5 and its best of breed storage tiering capabilities to preserve the critical content for long-term preservation and future re-use," said Romuald Sureau, IT backup & archive administrator, SatCen.

SatCen worked with Prosol, a Spanish-based Quantum certified Gold reseller, to design a robust and scalable infrastructure including the newly released StorNext 5, along with an M441 metadata applianceand its StorNext QX1200 Q-Series storage with 100 TB of usable capacity. Thanks to StorNext Storage Manager, the processed satellite images are automatically stored on a Quantum AEL500 LTO-6 tape library in 2 copies, one remaining in the tape library for long term preservation and future reuse, the other vaulted off-site for disaster recovery purposes.

StorNext® 5’s reliable and proven high-performance technology is found at the center of some of the most demanding workflows in the geospatial world. StorNext specialises in large files—up to 5 billion of these large files per StorNext cluster—and with its high-speed capture, StorNext has become an integral part of high-performance GIS workflows.