The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) provide a constant vigil for severe weather conditions over the United States and provides timely access to global environmental data to predict local weather events. The GOES operations ground equipment (OGE) is currently supporting five GOES satellites - GOES-11 (GOES-West), GOES-13 (GOES-East), GOES-12 (GOES-South for coverage to the South American region), GOES-14 (in on-orbit storage), and GOES-15 (undergoing testing). The current constellation of GOES satellites is expected to be operational until 2020, after which GOES-R will become the primary constellation.

In order to increase the longevity of GOES OGE, the Office of Systems Development (OSD) Ground Systems Division (GSD) developed a blade-based, scalable architecture called GOES Enterprise Managed System (GEMS). Since 2009, obsolete OGE components have been gradually migrated to GEMS, which improves operation efficiency and reduces long term operations and maintenance costs.

The phased transition involved three critical components of the GOES OGE - Replacement Product Monitor (RPM), Sensor Processing System (SPS), and Consolidated Analysis Workstation (CAWS), which are located at Wallops Command and Data Acquisition Station (WCDAS), Fairbanks Command and Data Acquisition Station (FCDAS), Wallops Backup Unit (WBU), and NOAA Satellites Operational Facility (NSOF). GEMS provides an enterprise level architecture that significantly enhances performance, scalability and reliability of GOES OGE components. It uses x86 blades to provide a unified shared infrastructure that significantly reduces installation time, energy consumption and maintenance costs. It encompasses latest virtualization technologies to simplify IT operations and streamline application deployment and migrations. It also provides enterprise backup capabilities to improve reliability of mission critical applications and data processing systems used for GOES.

This paper provides an in-depth discussion on implementing state-of-the-art technologies to transition mission critical components of the GOES OGE to the GEMS architecture, thus enabling NOAA/NESDIS to efficiently and effectively operate the ground system for GOES I-M and NOP satellites.