NASA: Pillar Launches NASA's Consolidated Storage System

Goddard Space Flight Center of NASA is home to America's largest organization of engineers and scientists dedicated to sharing and consolidating their knowledge of universe, solar system, earth and other planets. This case study speaks about the need of NASA for a storage system and the solution provided by Pillar Axiom. The centre holds information from recent and active space missions along with exhaustive archives. These are made available on the internet. This paper states that with the impending shuttle launches, the need to add cost-effective and manageable additional storage capacity to the existing system was felt. 5 to 10 terabytes of capacity was required for each future space mission. NASA decided to use the Pillar Axiom to integrate the information from NASA's Transition Region & Coronal Explorer and the European Space Agency's Solar & Heliospheric Observatory into one system. Presently, The Pillar Axiom Storage System functions within a heterogeneous network environment at the center with multiple client and server systems. The paper concludes that Pillar Axiom Storage System has enabled NASA'S Goddard Space Flight Centre to add storage to its systems without increasing the complexity of management. This has allowed NASA to present detailed archives for the use of scientists via the internet. The new system has also helped NASA in rationalizing its costs and managing its systems efficiently.