Those services require a state of the art data center consisting of storage, processing and networking components.

Especially since the ESA Copernicus program reached operational status with a number of Sentinel series satellites in Orbit and constantly providing new data, the needs and requirements for meaningful analysis have risen steeply.

Eurac Research and the Institute of Earth Observation with the support of the I&CT Division of the Scientific Network South Tyro, are now operating a storage backend in the Petabyte scale. This Big Data storage is built on the CEPH open source project, based on commodity hardware and highly scalable. Currently is providing more than 1 Petabyte (1.000.000.000.000 byte) of space, hosting the archive of satellite imagery over South Tyrol and the complete Alpine Arc.

In order to process and analyse all these data it is necessary to have a computing facility next to them. The Institute for Earth Observation is operating its own high performance computing cluster of more than 300 CPU cores and just about 3 Terabytes of RAM. Additionally, access to Eurac Research computing cluster, the EODC (Earth Observation Data Center, Vienna) and the Vienna Scientific Cluster guarantee that even very extensive computations can be performed.

Both the storage and the processing cluster are interconnected through a backbone network of 2x40 Gb/s, and a fast connection to the Internet is enabled at a 10 Gb/s, which allow a fast and efficient access and handling of the data.