To make available to a broader scientific community the Earth Science satellite data NASA has been collecting, NASA launched the ECHO Project and selected Global Science & Technology (GST) to be the project's prime contractor. ECHO is NASA's Earth Observing System Clearinghouse. It provides a clearinghouse of metadata describing and pointing to the Earth Science data available at data centers of NASA and other agency providers. ECHO is built on technologies from Oracle and Sun.

Security was built into the system as was business logic such as how researchers request data. The system was designed using a layered architecture, leveraging developments in JavaTM 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EETM), extending them and integrating them across the hardware and software of the system.

Keith Wichmann, ECHO Project System Engineer, talked about how they selected Oracle: "Oracle came in with the best, most mature solution to NASA's needs. Oracle database is in virtually every e-commerce system, and they drew on that experience to present an approach that met not only the letter of our requirement but its spirit."

One of NASA's requirements was to make sure the software represented the Earth as a sphere not a flat circle. They used Oracle Spatial, Oracle's foundation for deploying enterprise GIS, digital mapping and wireless location based services applications. "Oracle's willingness to collaborate with us to implement our specifics in Spatial was absolutely essential," said Wichmann.

"One of NASA's most important goals was risk reduction, and we knew that with Oracle that meant Sun," said Mark Nestler, ECHO Project Manager. "It wasn't just that Sun had the bulk of the market, but they had the momentum that was necessary that made us comfortable they'd be around in the future."

"Sun also had the technology we were looking for," added Wichmann. "We needed some pretty intense RAID capabilities and system throughput that was just as intense. We knew that Sun would come together with an integrated package, and that they had the type of service options we required. Lastly and maybe most important of all -- we needed the utmost in scalability and we knew we'd get that with Sun and Oracle. The metadata started fairly small, but we knew it would be growing into the tens of terabytes."

Discussing growth, Wichmann said, "The way SunTM Cluster 3 software and Oracle9i RAC are architected, both servers in the cluster are delivering their full power to the application and, in the event of a failure, failover is automatic. Sun Cluster with Oracle9i RAC provides several virtues that are important to us -- high availability, reduced monitoring requirements and hardware that's continually at work for us."

The initial ECHO Project system consists of a pair of Sun EnterpriseTM 450 servers equipped with Sun StorEdgeTM A5100 and A5200 disk arrays running Oracle9i Database with the Spatial option.

The future system to accommodate growth will consist of a pair of Sun FireTM V880 Oracle9i RAC database servers are clustered for high availability using Sun Cluster 3 software. Another pair of Sun Fire V880 servers perform the Web server role, using BEA WebLogic Server. The Sun Enterprise 450 servers that currently comprise the production system will be redeployed to become the operational part of the new system, ingesting metadata and serving up 'browse' data -- NASA's term for representative samples of imagery.

"Throughout the deployment, our vendors' people really stepped up to address every issue that arose," said Nestler. "One thing we really appreciated was that we didn't have to know exactly what issues there were or who was responsible for them. Our vendors worked together and got the system working with never an instance of finger pointing. That's the way it should be."

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