The health data of the planet Earth will be safe for the next 100 years which, for the first time, will be preserved thanks to a new service of custody of the information collected from space by satellites of the Copernicus Sentinels program of the European Union and ESA. For the first time in Europe, media based on optical technology will be used which will keep the data made available free of charge by ESA for many decades. will be Exprivia, the Italian company based in Molfetta in Puglia, in partnership with Sony, to supply for the next 18 months the archiving service.
The European Commission, ESA and the two players have announced that the international public tender announced by ESA and won by Exprivia concerns
il sistema Long Term Data Archive Service (Lta), for the conservation of data from couples of satellites
‘Sentinel 1, 2 e 3’ which monitor the terrestrial and marine environment, land surfaces and their movements, providing information on pollution, climate change and ecosystems, as well as humanitarian support mapping in crisis situations. The revolutionary storage system for ‘raw’ data – captured directly from the satellite – will use for the first time in Europe the new Oda Gen3 optical media, the third generation of Sony’s Optical Disc Archive (Oda) technology, a system aimed at the long-term archiving for the storage of Big Data.
Thanks to Oda, for the next 100 years, in fact, an immense amount of information (more than 8 Peta Bytes at the end of 2021) coming from observation and monitoring of the Earth, it will be stored in more performing and durable devices than traditional magnetic media. The data, once processed at higher levels, will be available free of charge to citizens, public and private entities – including research institutes, military or government authorities – and authorized companies who request it. The Lta service, developed for the first time in the Aerospace field on optical technology and by an Italian company, records a daily flow of approximately one Terabyte (Tb) of data for each satellite from the European “acquisition-and-processing” centers, it extracts the metadata and archives them on-line, near-line and off-line.
The solution proposed by Exprivia will allow data to be cataloged, checked and indexed, guaranteeing its conservation and future recovery.. It is also the first time that ESA entrusts data storage to an external company that will ensure the timely and accurate storage of the information collected, as well as periodically monitoring their accessibility.
“The raw data acquired by the Copernicus satellites are the basis of all the information coming from our planet and constitute a fund of fundamental importance” underlined Roberto Medri, Head of Digital Factory, Defense & Aerospace of Exprivia. The manager explained that “the solution devised by Exprivia, combined with Sony’s Oda technology, guarantees reliability and safety, contributing to the knowledge of the environmental, terrestrial, meteorological and atmospheric phenomena of our planet for the next decades. A new approach that will put provision of free information for future generations to help safeguard the Earth “.
Medri assured that “this technology, from space, is now available for other contexts in the IT world, for the protection of databases heterogeneous in markets such as Industry, Healthcare, Public Administration and the Banking world “. Sony has been involved with the prestigious project team to contribute to an innovative and data security approach. Benito Manlio Mari, Country Sales Manager of Sony Professional Solutions Europe, recalled that “in 2012 Sony R&D introduced Optical Disc Archive (Oda) for long-term data archiving as a result of more than 30 years. research and development “. The Oda solution, based on optical technology, immediately received a wide consensus from the market thanks to a series of exclusive features, such as – Mari reported – extremely high reliability, protection strategies and direct access to data “.
In its evolutionary path, Oda has reached the third generation, offering a capacity of 5.5 TB in Worm mode allowing reading at speeds up to 3Gbps and writing up to 1.5Gbps. Valter Corda, Product Manager of Sony Professional Solutions Europe, added that “Oda is able to preserve the stored data for 100 years, offers a high resistance to environmental agents and, compared to other physical media, it ensures the highest expectation of reproducibility in relation to the generational evolution of optical technologies. Furthermore, by reading the data, it is not subject to the obligation to migrate to new generation platforms, thus proposing a significant reduction in operating costs compared to solutions based on magnetic tape or HDD “.
Alfredo Donadei, Sales Manager of Sony Professional Solutions Europe, also noted that “Sony Professional was awarded Exprivia for its important role had not only for the aspect of technological adoption, achieved through evident emphasis on the development of the application integration of the Oda system, but also for the components linked to the value of environmental sustainability that is part of Sony’s own identity “. In addition to Sony, Retelit companies collaborate as strategic partners with Exprivia, for the Cloud infrastructure on which to process the large amount of data to be stored, e Mandarin (local telco operator) which manages the colocation, IP Transit and Peering services provided at the OpenHubMed Data Center (open Exchange and Neutral Access Point).