OpenNebulaConf2018

The Institute for Earth Observation (EO) at Eurac Research, in Bolzano (South Tyrol  - Italy), is using OpenNebula Cloud Management software to handle efficiently Big Data derived from satellites as well as from other environmental sensing techniques.
Data from different sensors are processed and integrated with models in order to produce application specific EO products and services for monitoring and understanding of complex processes in the mountain cryosphere (snow and glacier related processes) and the vegetation (mainly forest and grassland) in mountain areas, both challenged by climate change.
Within the last years Eurac Research has enhanced it's virtualization platform and storage solutions, with an open and scalable solution that combines OpenNebula Cloud management software with a unified and scalable storage, that is Ceph distributed storage system, which meets well the requirements of big data storage. Some EO specific use cases are described along with particular highlights on user experiences and key performance indicators important for Big Data analysis, in particular I/O access and networking throughput.
The use cases and results provided are related to the Sentinel Alpine Observatory (SAO) initiative platform, powered by a virtualized environment managed by OpenNebula, and to projects that make use of the available core services implemented, that are the H2020 project openEO ( http://openeo.org/ ) and the experience gathered at the OGC Earth Observation Exploitation Hackathon 2018 ( https://github.com/opengeospatial/EOEPHackathon2018 ). Further, the possible Integration of OpenNebula with other virtualization platforms has been evaluated and partially inspected.