Archiving and processing of EO data - the data driven approach

With more than twenty years of experience in design, development and delivery of Earth Observation Data processing systems, Advanced Computer Systems (ACS), based in Rome, Italy, is a leading firm in this field. More than one hundred operational systems are today in operation in 25 countries, within and outside Europe, mostly running 24 hours a day, ingesting and processing many of the available EO satellites like LANDSAT, SPOT, ERS, JERS, SRTM, Radarsat and Envisat. In the frame of two open competitions issued from ESA, ACS has been awarded in 2001 and 2003 of the contracts respectively for the design and development of the CRYOSAT and GOCE Earth Explorer Missions. The Core of the new PDS (Payload Data Segment) developed for CRYOSAT and GOCE is the Storage Archive, represented by an integrated collaboration of a Data Base Management System (DBMS) and a Hierarchical Storage Management system (HSM) completely designed and developed by ACS. The HSM, designed originally for the management of very large multimedia archives (500 TBytes of the RAI digital audio archive), has been completely wrapped by a DBMS-based facility, designed to support and allow a data driven access to EO data, both for ingesting and processing systems. Annexed to the Core of the PDS, a distributed wrapper (Thin Layer) of the data processors, decoupling completely the Infrastructure and the Science Processors has been designed and implemented. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the design of the developed infrastructure of the Storage Archive for these two missions