Case Study: NSIDC (University of Colorado) achieves real-time, high-performance time-series analysis of 10 billion objects with Actian's Versant Object Database

NSIDC - Customer Case Study

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado develops time-centric change-analysis systems for cryospheric research (initially targeting the Greenland ice sheet). Faced with massive multimodal time‑series—over 10 billion persistent "data rod" objects—NSIDC needed real‑time indexed queries across millions of locations with response times of only a few seconds, a workload impractical for relational databases.

NSIDC adopted the pure‑object Versant Object Database, which stores arbitrarily complex objects without object‑relational mapping and provides persistence, distribution, integrity, concurrency and recovery. Versant delivers the high ingestion rates, scalable distributed storage and orders‑of‑magnitude retrieval performance required for fast, concurrent time‑series analysis; a web interface will provide researchers and the public with query, filtering, analysis and download access.

NSIDC