ECONOMICS

BakBone Software today announced that NASA Langley Vehicle Analysis Branch is using NetVault to backup mission-critical flight trajectory and atmospheric data from NASA's January 2004 MER-Spirit and Opportunity (Mars Exploration Rover) entry, descent and landings on Mars. This data will be used in future MER projects including the slated 2005 Mars Reconnaissance Orbitor and 2007 Phoenix Lander missions. "Like many people around the world, I was fascinated with the technology and scientific vision that brought the landscape of Mars into our living rooms," said Keith Rickard, president and CEO of BakBone Software. "BakBone is very proud to have been selected by NASA Langley for the MER mission following their thorough evaluation of available enterprise-class solutions. We continue to see momentum in customer adoption of NetVault for government applications and within mission-critical storage environments. NetVault's ability to rapidly restore data and seamlessly support high production computing environments offers customers a powerful combination for delivering what they want most in a data protection solution." Telemetry information collected during Spirit's entry into the Mars atmosphere and subsequent landing on the surface was used to make necessary adjustments in preparation for Opportunity's landing on January 25. Despite a three-week lead time following Spirit's landing on the surface of Mars, due to stringent testing required prior to making any modifications, the MER team had a one-week window to assess the terabytes of data collected from Spirit, make changes and feed the information back to the flight software coders. The need to achieve the fastest restores possible with the highest amount of data availability and integrity were critical to the successful landing of Opportunity. "The reliability of the data collected from the Spirit landing was crucial as it formed the basis for any decisions made on adjustments to Opportunity's landing," said Prasun Desai, Langley's MER project lead. "The second mission could easily have been jeopardized without the capability of comparing our computer based simulations with the data actually generated by Spirit. With NetVault we were confident that our data backed up and could be recovered quickly and efficiently when we needed it most. NetVault will be instrumental in protecting this critical data for ongoing analysis and use in future missions." BakBone's NetVault manages an SGI IRIX 3000 server used to control the aircraft, trajectory and atmospheric data sent from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to NASA Langley. This data is central to NASA Langley's support of JPL. NetVault provides daily and incremental backups for 24 heterogeneous clients, a Clariion disk array and TP9400 disk array to a Spectra Logic T950 500 slot tape library via a Fibre channel network. NetVault's high performance data movers, disk staging and comprehensive disaster recovery options ensure that data can be backed up, and more importantly, recovered quickly and efficiently. NASA Langley selected NetVault for its robustness, lower total cost of ownership and high performance features. Using NetVault's superior support for SGI to replace an outdated competitive backup solution enabled NASA Langley to maintain its existing network environment. Charles Davis, a systems administrator at Raytheon Corp. in Lexington, Mass., was contracted by NASA to help develop the SAN, which stores and backs up data received from the Rovers. "Exceptionally robust, yet easy to use and administer, BakBone's NetVault software delivers the enhanced data protection and data availability that an organization like NASA, with critical data environments, need," said Charles Davis, systems administrator at Raytheon Corp. "Because of NetVault's scalable, modular architecture, NASA Langley will be able to back up and restore greater amounts of data with less disruption and increased protection of critical information."