Zadara Storage, the provider of enterprise-class storage-as-a-service (STaaS), and CloudSigma, a public cloud IaaS provider with advanced hybrid hosting solutions, today announced that the European Space Agency (ESA) is leveraging the Zadara Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA) service in the CloudSigma Zurich cloud, in the service of public safety. The agency is using satellite data stored on the award-winning Zadara VPSA service to gain a better understanding of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and by so doing help reduce the loss to life and property as well as the economic impact caused by these natural disasters.

The Geohazard Supersites project’s mission is to advance scientific understanding of the physical processes that control earthquakes and volcanic eruptions as well as those driving tectonics and Earth surface dynamics. A major challenge for the project is the Super Site Exploitation Platform (SSEP) satellite data archive, which is large and is growing as the site adds new activities and new data sources (i.e., satellites). ESA recognizes cloud computing’s potential to reach new audiences for its datasets and to spark new innovation. The Zadara VPSA service, offered by CloudSigma as Scale-Out Magnetic Storage, provides ESA’s SSEP team flexible and cost-effective storage with the necessary performance and scalability to run its analyses and store the satellite data and computational results. Thanks to Zadara VPSA, in conjunction with compute resources from CloudSigma, these large data sets can remain online at all times and be processed in place.

“We need large amounts of high performance storage, because our data archive is very large and growing,” said Julio Carreira, capacity manager at ESA. “By having our choice of good performance, cost effective storage as well as high-performance SSD storage, all of which is elastic and on-demand, we’re able to quickly and cost effectively deploy our platform, whose goal is to use Earth Observation data to protect both life and property from earthquake and volcanic hazards.”

“We see the cloud as having great potential for assisting the scientific community and in expanding the realm of possibilities unleashed by deploying such a flexible platform. We are very excited to see the new products and services that will develop from these cloud data repositories powered by CloudSigma and Zadara Storage,” said Robert Jenkins, CEO of CloudSigma.

“This is a great example of the power of the cloud when it comes to providing a public service. The combination of Zadara Storage and CloudSigma has provided the European Space Agency a powerful, elastic, rapidly deployable platform on which to run its applications and store its data,” said Nelson Nahum, CEO of Zadara Storage. “Additionally, the platform is much more cost effective than purchasing on-site storage – ensuring public funds are used as effectively as possible.”