EOSDIS Evolution

Overview

In early 2005, NASA embarked on an EOSDIS Evolution study to address the following goals/issues:

• Manage archive volume growth
• Improve science need response and data access
• Reduce recurring costs of operations and sustaining engineering
• Update aging of systems and components
• Move towards a more distributed environment

A 2015 timeframe was developed to guide the conduct of the study. The "Step 1" Plan was approved and initiated in late 2005.

Key benefits of the "Step 1" Plan:

• Maximize Science Value
• Data access easier and data products quickly available to science community
• Substantial Cost Savings
• Addresses operational and sustaining engineering
• Takes advantage of current IT advances
• Manageable Risk
• Minimizes software development efforts
• Builds upon existing systems
• Reduces footprint for EOSDIS Core System (ECS)

For more information, see http://eosdis-evolution.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Role of ECHO in EOSDIS Evolution

One key feature of "Step 1" of the Evolution plan was achieving higher operational maturity (ingest, reconciliation, search and order, performance, error handling) for the ECHO system. This was accomplished with the release of ECHO 10.0 in April 2008. Until then, ESDIS was improving functionality and performance with major version releases of ECHO. ECHO is now in a sustaining engineering mode where only incremental point releases will be implemented and not major version changes.

EDG-to-WIST Transition

Another key feature of "Step 1" of the Evolution plan was the replacement of the inflexible and hard to maintain legacy system, EOS Data Gateway (EDG) with the internally-developed client of ECHO named the Warehouse Inventory Search Tool (WIST) as the primary means of accessing EOSDIS and other Earth science data holdings archived at the EOSDIS data centers.

The requirements, of which all were met, for the WIST replacing the EDG were that all current EOS data providers of the EDG must have their data available in ECHO/WIST and that ECHO/WIST functionality and performance must match or surpass that of the EDG.

The EDG-to-WIST transition began in July 2008 with users of the EDG migrating their user accounts to ECHO/WIST using the Self Migration Tool (SMT). Since the beginning of the transition, ECHO/WIST is gaining approximately 18 new users per day. The user migration is scheduled to end by November 2008 signaling the end of the EDG-to-WIST transition and the shutdown of the EDG system.

To satisfy another key feature of "Step 1" of the Evolution plan, the Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) developed an ECHO Portal that allows users to gain direct access to ECHO granule-level data from within GCMD.