European Union Satellite Centre Picks Quantum StorNext 5

Located in Torrejón de Ardoz, in the vicinity of Madrid, Spain, the European Union Satellite Centre (EU SatCen), commonly known as SatCen, is an agency of the European Union’s Council of Ministers, which gathers information through satellite images.

Facing an annual growth of geospatial data of over 30%, the EU SatCen selected Quantum StorNext 5 storage systems to manage and archive its mission-critical data for the long-term.

Specialised in humanitarian aid missions and peacekeeping missions such as recovery from natural disaster or evacuation operations, SatCen is 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 GBs 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 and archive administrator, SatCen.

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

StorNext 5’s reliable  and 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 GIS workflows.