Earth Observation and geospatial analysis data services development needs the support of reliable and performant ict resources and data structures.

MEEO can count on its own data center facility that provides computational resources and storage capability for several scopes like research and development activities, for data mining services, for long term data preservation services and for massive data processing services. The MEEO data center facility (MEEO-DAF) is continuously renovating, increasing and evolving both in terms of hardware and software. In its last configuration, MEEO-DAF presents a distributed architecture made of two DPIs (Data processing Infrastructures) exposing a unique cloud infrastructure operated by means of Open Nebula cloud solution.

Initially created for Earth Observation data services development and test, it has been extended to provide computational resources and hosting to every kind of geospatial data service from the storage to the massive processing. A part the internal use, the facility gives academic, government and commercial users access to internally hosted climate and EO Data alongside a wide range of associated Services for data processing, visualization and analysis.

The MEEO DAF is distributed in two sites, at the University of Ferrara Data center and at the Lepida Ferrara Datacenter. The two DPIs are interconnected to the 1Gbps high-speed backbone GARR network and they are configured to provide resources and storage redundancy. The computational capacity of the two DPIs is more that 1000 cores and more of 4,5 TB of RAM. The storage capacity is more than 1 PByte online and 3,5 PByte off-line.

The two DPIs are managed as a unique cloud infrastructure exposing a virtualization layer managed though OpenNebula solution. That layer allows the management of cluster of virtual machines and to develop and test scalable data processing solutions.

The MEEO DAF is not only hardware and software. Cloud computing services and ict hardware resources need to be configured and optimized differently for any specific usage like for example, massive processing, effective on-line storage, big numbers of records, large files di be manage, scalable web service accessing , scalable processing and long term data preservation are only few examples of the almost endless possibilities of cloud resources usage. MEEO staff is tackling with these issues long since and it has gained a valuable and decadal experience in managing a large variety of problems that might be considered rare if not unique.