Backup & Archive

Backup and Archive

The article for this week is entitled “A Novel Approach to Automated, Secure, Reliable, & Distributed Backup of MER Tactical Data on Clouds.” This article was very interesting and gave plenty of factual information on backup and archive data. The table of contents of this article include: introduction, cloud computing for backup storage, methodology, results, interpretations, conclusions, recommendations, acknowledgements, references, and biographies. All of these headings have important information with regard to the topic.

            This article is based around the 2010 MER project, which stands for Mars Exploration Rover. This was the first NASA mission to include a public cloud into its daily mission-critical operations. This switch allowed the availability of one hundred percent of save data, search data, and retrieval of data. The public cloud operation also allowed cost savings, durability, and reliability. “The Operations Storage System (OSS) on MER currently contains 21 TB of data, which includes both uplink and downlink data,” as mentioned in the article. This is a lot of storage space to save plenty of data. Future steps for the MER’s cloud journey is to incorporate new generation storage solutions into data backup and retention strategies. Data that is uploaded is never introduced to the key into the cloud environment due to the novel encryption techniques used by NASA.

            This was a well written article that shared a lot of information on the cloud data storage process of the 2010 Mars Rover Project. It is interesting how new technologies are being used every day and in missions such as this one.