The Server Labs @ The European Ground System Architecture Workshop (ESAW) 2011

May 18th, 2011
by Alfonso Olias.

We recently participated in The European Ground System Architecture Workshop (ESAW) 2011 that was held at ESOC, Darmstadt, Germany, on 10 and 11 May 2011.

With  nearly 300 Ground Systems architects and experts from European and American Space Agencies, Telecommunication Operators, Satellite Primes, European Institutes and Universities, European Industry and companies from USA, Canada and many other countries around the world, the workshop was a great success and a platform for open exchange of ideas and concepts. It included numerous topics related to ground segment architecture (MCS, FDS, MPS, Back-end, EGSE, etc.), Cloud, Service Oriented Architectures SOA and message-oriented architectures, modelling, ground software systems ( Language trends, Commercial off-the-shelf, open source components, and operational SW,  Software reuse, Emerging ground system technologies and harmonisation ), data system harmonisation, security and information assurance, automation and integrated services, interoperability and standards, Intellectual Property Rights, Licensing and Third Party rights management.

Cost reduction was one of the key issues throughout the conference together with the general perception that the “good days” have gone. The message was clear: do more and better with less money. The cost reductions not only affect Science missions, but also commercial projects which need to be profitable. Therefore all the system architectures, technologies and trends aligned the benefits of their proposals with the fact that they would bring down costs in software development, management, maintainability etc.

The common idea among all the Software cost saving proposals was the use of a common core (EGS-CC), so all the future missions would share the costs and save money. This is key, since there are synergies among all the missions.

We at The Server Labs, have once more participated actively in the workshop contributing with both a technical presentation and the creation of a large-scale poster explaining the application of Cloud computing to Ground System Architectures. The use cases we presented in the poster generated a lot of interest as did the outline of how Cloud Computing could help the Ground System Architectures to obtain Faster delivery of services, increase Service Elasticity, to provide Self-service provisioning and management & Self-management and automatic scaling, and to benefit of the associated Cost Reduction from the resource user’s perspective, as it allows a pay per use billing model.

We also delivered a presentation on SOA4GDS “Evaluating the suitability of emerging service based technologies in ground data systems” The SOA4GDS project is a study for the ESA Basic Technology
Research Project (TRP) which has been conducted jointly by The Server Labs and VEGA to evaluate the suitability of emerging service-based technologies, like for example SOA, for the technical requirements of ESA/ESOC’s ground data systems.

We definitively think that the workshop was a great success and look forward to participating in the next one.

See you again in 2013!

Posted in: Cloud, Events, Partners.

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