GSC Sentinel-2 PDGS OCD - Emits - ESA

GSC Sentinel-2 PDGS OCD
Issue 1 Revision 2 (draft) - 25.07.2010
GMES-GSEG-EOPG-TN-09-0008
page 80 of 350
computers are important drivers to take into account as gradually releasing the constraints
imposed for data management and transportation. In particular, the following technology
areas are considered as particularly relevant to the definition of the PDGS:
○ The ever growing throughput capacity of digital communication networks, their access
costs, and reaching of end-user bases throughout developed and less developed
countries;
○ The ever growing capacity of physical media for digital data storage, their affordability,
reliability and plug-and-play capabilities into wide-ranging hosting hardware;
○ The ever growing performance of CPUs and their high-performance coupled solutions
with mass storage systems (e.g. Storage Area Networks), and the new flexibility and
reliability offered through blade technologies for overall limited investments;
○ The every growing availability and maturity of Internet based services related to on-line
data storage, publishing and computing (e.g. e.g. Content Delivery Networks, “Cloud-
Computing”, etc);
○ The overall maturing standardisation and interoperability of all digital media
management components in terms of hardware, software and services.
Although the capacity of communication networks is expected to grow substantially with the
years, it will also be required to support the parallel transportation of more and more media. It
is hence expected that the share of public or private networks to transport earth-observation
data will not necessarily gain remarkable growth to sustain an exponentially growing demand
at reasonable costs (cf. 4.3.5.3). On the other hand, specific solutions are advertised by
Internet carriers in their development trends in that the effective bandwidth of digital-data
transportation can be optimised by replication and localisation of the data close to the
consumers (e.g. P4P technology, GoogleEarth, etc).
The maturing opportunities offered through Content Delivery Network (CDN) services to
match highly non-deterministic and growing demands of data from the general public is
highlighted as an interesting prospect relevant to the publishing of Sentinel-2 images via
Internet with the required scalability. The use of this technology is widely used in particular at
ESA for web-publishing as providing guaranteed scalable solutions via well-defined service
level agreements.
The opportunities currently emerging under the labelling “cloud-computing” are also of
interest as fostering the remote access “as a service” to storage and processing resources
provided over the network. This technology will potentially bring cost-effective trade-off
solutions to maintenance and swift scalability of data-management infrastructures (e.g. for
bulk data reprocessing). Nevertheless, these services are currently impaired by the
preliminary data uploads required to the remote “cloud” infrastructures, a pre-requisite to take
benefit of the services whilst creating a direct bottleneck for high-volume demanding
applications such as EO data processing and publishing. The lack of standardisation and
interoperability between suppliers in this area can also be considered a non negligible risk, of
being constrained in operations with a particular supplier after the upload investment.
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