Team: IT Management and Engineering
The team has the cross-sectional responsibility in IT management for both institutes of the EOC and oversees engineering and operations of the IT infrastructure with a focus on data management for Earth Observation missions and projects .
Lead by the EOC IT Manager, the team members define, implement, monitor, and control all IT-related processes of the EOC. They have a wide range of IT skills and expertise.
An automated configuration management system is used to efficiently manage the numerous IT systems in the EOC. An internal asset management system provides a live inventory of all active systems and is also linked to an automated reporting tool. In addition, the team operates EOC-wide IT services, such as a monitoring system and a highly efficient backup system.
IT security is of primary importance to the EOC. The EOC's IT security officer and his deputy are therefore also part of the team. They define the EOC's IT security regulations and ensure compliance. This includes defining the overall network architecture, taking into account relevant security aspects, including monitoring and continuously improving firewall policies.
The team is responsible for operating the infrastructure tier of the German Satellite Data Archive (D-SDA), including its robotic tape libraries and associated hardware, hierarchical storage management software, and operating systems. This infrastructure is used for long-term archiving of payload data from national, European and international Earth observation missions. Stable operations of the archive, including safeguarding at least two copies of the data on tape in different locations, have provided reliable service over the past decades with no data ever lost.
Exponentially increasing data volumes, as well as ever-increasing demands on system performance, require continuous modernization of the archive's infrastructure. For example, a disk-based archiving technology (FastLTA Silent Brick System) has recently been introduced to hold the primary data copy, reducing retrieval latency from several minutes down to seconds.
To relieve scientific users of complex storage management, enable them to manage large amounts of data, and prevent data loss, we designed and established the EOC Data Online Storage system EDOS. EDOS is the foundation for a harmonized internal data access infrastructure for Earth observation data, as well as for individual project data holdings. As an expandable storage system in the petabyte range it offers reliable and fast storage space with minimum onboarding effort and cost.
We constantly work on consolidating the EOC's IT systems. To this end, the team is currently building an EOC-wide cloud infrastructure, the EOCloud. As a private cloud, EOCloud will meet the computing resource needs of scientific users as well as of projects in the payload data ground segment (PDGS) of Earth observation missions.