Building cost-effective remote data storage capabilities for NASA's EOSDIS

NASA Earth Observing System (EOS) Program is now collecting unprecedented volumes of data (nearly one petabyte/year) to aid the nation in its understanding of the Earth near and long-term climate processes. These data are a national resource that must be carefully preserved to maximize the nations return on the EOS Program. To address this need NASA has initiated the development of a Remote Data Store (RDS) backup and recovery capability that will operate independent of but closely allied to, the current Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs). This paper outlines the following: the evolutionary technology path that will ultimately provide automated, secure, seamless and efficient remote on-line redundant storage; and the recovery and access of operational EOS mission data products. Significant factors that affect the total cost of operations are discussed, as well as emerging technologies and standards. Preliminary modeling points to the operational staffing levels as a dominant cost component. If on-line storage management techniques cannot improve to the point where a small staff can manage petabytes of data, the viability of disk-based storage solutions for large scientific data repositories is unlikely.