GOVERNMENT

University of Central Lancashire stores NASA solar images at a rate of 1.5TBs of new data daily for use by UK solar scientists

A new storage system at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), built by OCF using Sun storage hardware, enables UK solar scientists to access and analyse vast quantities of NASA generated solar images.

Access to the images, each one ten times the resolution of HD TV, enables scientists to more quickly understand the Sun's magnetic field and corona, what governs changes in the Sun's activity and how that activity affects Planet Earth.

“NASA recently launched a new solar observing satellite to study the Sun and solar activity,” says Dr. Steven Chapman, HPC manager, UCLan.  “The satellite's telescopes will take 80 high quality images every minute of every day generating the equivalent of 1.5 terabytes of data daily - the equivalent of 2246 average CDs, 90 CDs per hour or 320 DVDs per day.  We are receiving the images from NASA, storing them and making them available to the solar scientific community in the UK.”

The storage system is easily manageable and scalable and can currently store 144 TBs of data; images will be deleted on a rolling three month schedule to accommodate new images arriving every day.

The storage system, funded entirely by the University without external support was designed, installed and configured by UK HPC and storage integrator OCF.

“Data generated and stored by organisations around the world is growing at an alarming rate,” says Julian Fielden, managing director, OCF plc.  “IDC puts the total worldwide data figure at 281 Billion Gigabytes. “The need for expertly configured, infinitely scalable and easily manageable storage systems is now increasingly essential for organisations of any size and in any sector.”  

The storage system uses Sun Fire X4540 storage hardware and the Solaris ZFS file system.