An Atlas V 401 rocket carrying two lunar satellites was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 5:32 p.m. EDT on June 18th in what is being described as America’s first step to the lasting return to the moon. One of the satellites, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), will begin to provide high-definition imagery of the moon once in orbit with a copy of all data stored on the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network via CloudNAS, a software based gateway to secure enterprise cloud storage.



After a four-day trip, the LRO will begin orbiting the moon, spending at least a year in a low polar orbit collecting detailed information about the lunar environment that will help in future robotic and human missions to the moon. Images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera will be transmitted from the satellite to a project team at Arizona State University for systematic processing, replicated to secondary high-performance storage in a separate building at ASU and then replicated to the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network (SDN). Nirvanix provides a method for storing a tertiary copy of the data offsite by installing CloudNAS and writing a copy directly from the data-receiving servers. ASU and NASA have already transferred multiple TBs of original Apollo mission imagery to the Nirvanix CloudNAS-based solution.

“While this project may be one small step for NASA’s program to extend human presence in the solar system, it definitely represents a giant leap in cloud storage’s ability to provide a reliable, scalable and accessible alternative to tape for long-term retention of enterprise-class data,” said Jim Zierick, President and CEO of Nirvanix. “The tertiary copy of images from the LRO Camera stored on the Nirvanix CloudNAS is online and accessible within seconds and the project managers at ASU do not need to worry about managing offsite storage, allowing them to focus on the more important mission at hand. We are pleased to be part of such a historic project and value our contribution to finding a deeper understanding of the moon and its environment.”

Nirvanix CloudNAS is a fast, secure and easy way to gain access to the benefits of Cloud Storage. As the world's first software-only NAS solution accessible via CIFS or NFS, CloudNAS offers enhanced secure data transfers to any of Nirvanix's globally distributed storage nodes using integrated AES 256-bit encryption and SSL options. Through the Nirvanix CloudNAS, organizations have access to unlimited storage via the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network with the ability to turn any server on their network into a gateway to the cloud accessible by many existing applications and processes.