Comprehensive Large Array-data Stewardship System:Infrastructure and Architecture Improvements for NPP and GOES-R

The Comprehensive Large Array-data Stewardship System (CLASS) is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) enterprise-wide information technology system designed to support long-term, secure preservation and standards-based access to environmental data collections and information. The system is owned and operated by the NOAA National Data Centers and supports the ingest, quality control, archival storage of and public access to data and science information. With the prospect of higher data-rate earth observation systems planned for deployment and the incorporation of existing NOAA data collections into the Data Centers, management of these exponentially increasing volumes of environmental data will require a rapid expansion in storage capacity, additional access methods, and improved automation of data ingest, archive and quality control. Together, the NOAA National Data Centers, utilizing the IT infrastructure of CLASS, will provide the necessary ingredients to fulfill NOAA's data stewardship mission. In order to be ready for the large volumes of data expected from missions like climate model data, NPP, JPSS, and GOES-R, the CLASS team is preparing to upgrade major components of its current infrastructure while also planning for significant improvements in its longer-term architecture. CLASS has developed hardware and software evolution plans for near-term upgrades for climate model and NPP data, while looking further into the future with its Target System Architecture (TSA) Overview and its follow-on document, the TSA Transition Plan. Near-term upgrades include deploying new SAN disks, migrating from LTO-2 to LTO-4 tapes, upgrading server capacities, enhancing the efficiency of our software, and increasing bandwidth capacities. These will all be in place for the launch of the NPP satellite. Longer term, CLASS is well into a major software evolution to better align with the target system architecture and is implementing a new design to provide more nodes to interface with data providers. These new “receipt nodes” will provide higher availability and reliability to improve the efficiency of receiving and ingesting data from external data providers into the CLASS data archive. The benefits of this overall approach include building on the current, known system design to improve data integrity for the volumes of climate model and NPP data and build on the target system architecture for the every growing data volumes including JPSS and GOES-R that are coming into the CLASS system. These will provide the IT infrastructure so that information stewards at the NOAA data centers can preserve the value environmental information for years to come and so that consumers can easily access these large volumes of data.