ESA Case Study

Industry:

Business Services

Services:

Cloud NetworkingManaged Services

ESA at a
glance

End-to-end integration of ESA facilities and the Cloud

Scaled from 300TB of data to more than 8PB of data

High levels of automation with high levels of ICT resources

Hybrid cloud infrastructure, Virtual Data Center, private cloud, end-to-end integration of all ESA facilities.

22 member states,
8 centralized facilities**

SITES

2,200

WORLDWIDE EMPLOYEES

(2021) EUR 6.49 Billion

ANNUAL BUDGET

The Need

The European Space Agency (ESA) shares earth observation (EO) data collected through its comprehensive fleet of satellites orbiting the Earth with the many communities that study and leverage the data for scientific, commercial and educational purposes. The fleet of satellites serve multiple missions including the SMOS mission to measure soil moisture and ocean salinity, the Aeolus mission to profile the earth’s wind patterns, the Cryosat mission to measure polar sea ice thickness and changes in ice sheets and the Swarm mission to study the earth’s magnetic field.

Working with GTT and other institutional partners, ESA is offering the many communities engaged with long – and short-term earth surface data exploitation, the ability to access and process data in a practical and secure way for a wide range of scientific, commercial and general interest purposes.”

HEAD OF THE EARTH OBSERVATION COMMON SERVICES SECTION, ESA

The GTT Solution

A Platform Optimized for Big Data Exploration.

Hybrid cloud infrastructure

The solution, based on the Virtual Data Center (VDC) solution stores and processes ESA’s EO multi-mission satellite data. The GTT VDC private cloud offers a “single-pane-of glass” user interface fit for a multi-cloud environment. The GTT VDC allows portability to third-party public clouds such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. ESA can operate smoothly with high levels of automation and uniformity, choosing the best execution venue for each workload. The solution brings together multiple underlying ICT resources that allow users to view and retrieve data and perform tasks using different archives and tools.

Network Integration

GTT ensures end-to-end network integration between key ESA facilities and the agency’s multi cloud environment. The service supports the entire EO user community and connects eight ESA locations in Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Swed.