Case Study: Airbus Defence and Space achieves petascale archive for Sentinel satellite data with Quantum Corporation’s StorNext

Airbus Defence and Space Launches a Petascale Archive for Satellite Data with StorNext Scale-out Storage

Airbus Defence and Space (UK) is responsible for archiving continuous Earth observation data from ESA’s Sentinel satellites for millions of potential commercial users in agriculture, forestry, telecoms and insurance. The team faced a scale and diversity challenge: each satellite streams ~250 MB/s (more than 1 PB/year), files range from tiny metadata to large imagery, and the archive needed to retain tens of petabytes and tens of millions of files long-term while keeping costs and administration overhead low.

Airbus deployed Quantum StorNext scale-out, multi-tier storage—StorNext metadata appliances, a primary disk cache and StorNext AEL6000 tape archives (moving to LTO-7) with policy-driven EDLM—to deliver continuous high-speed ingest (≈1.1 GB/s), fast retrieval (individual files <1 min, PB-scale transfers via Fibre Channel), and automated tape integrity management. The result is a cost-effective, scalable archive (initially 18 PB, expandable to ~37 PB) that safeguards data, supports heterogeneous OS access, serves large user bases, and can be managed by a very small team while scaling for future mission growth.

Airbus Defence and Space

Mark Curtis

Technical Design Authority