Data Storage

In our experience, one of the biggest barriers to effective informatics is data management. This is especially true for geospatial data streams which can be enormous in volume. Compounding this are the ongoing requirements of keeping databases current while maintaining retrieval access to archival data for the purpose of temporal analysis. Given these criteria it's easy to see how storage capacity can be quickly overrun.

In most of the developed world, widespread access to inexpensive storage is fairly common. However, in many developing countries and emerging market economies, access to reliable, redundant, monitored and low-cost storage can be a significant challenge.

The Minerva storage architecture was developed to address the need for scalable and reliable high-performance high-volume storage solutions suitable for installation anywhere in the world, at the lowest possible cost. It is based around a physical 19" 4U rack-mounted pod containing 7200 RPM SATA hard drives. These are arranged in individual RAID 6 volumes with data striping and dual distributed parity. The resulting configuration provides double fault-tolerance - 3 drives need to fail before a volume is lost.

From this basic building block Minerva Informatics can configure reliable, low-cost customized storage that is highly scalable, with basic modules providing in excess of 33 TB per U, with overall server farm capacity in the order of Petabytes.