Elodie Collins 
ERT has supported the transformation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Comprehensive Large Array-data Stewardship System, or CLASS, electronic library of environmental data from a traditional on-premise to cloud-based architecture.
The Greenbelt, Maryland-headquartered digital engineering and applied sciences company said Friday that the cloud transition of CLASS led to “hundreds of dollars per terabyte” in savings in storage costs and enhanced the system’s long‑term resilience.
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How Did ERT Help CLASS’s Cloud Transition?
According to Michael Hamilton, part of the CLASS operations, maintenance and sustainment, or OMS, project team at ERT, the company transitioned file delivery from on-premises to Amazon Web Services’ cloud to enhance the electronic library’s dissemination architecture.
“This transition was executed with no interruption to operational services and continued to reliably support a substantial monthly workload, averaging approximately 13 million files and 750 TB of data made available to users,” Hamilton shared.
ERT also worked on the capabilities of CLASS to ingest, process and archive historical Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, or GOES, and GOES Variable, also known as GVAR, datasets from the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Space Science and Engineering Center.
Christine Bradley, OMS CLASS project manager at ERT, added that the team moved over 15 petabytes of data during the process.
“My team rose to the challenge,” Bradley stated. “They delivered ahead of schedule, under budget, and with a level of excellence that positions CLASS to serve NOAA’s mission for decades to come.”
What Are Other Services Does ERT Provide to NOAA?
ERT is also operating and maintaining a ground network of antenna and IT systems for NOAA’s environmental satellites under a contract awarded in March 2021. The contract, valued at $699.6 million over 10 years, also supports the agency’s migration of satellite data products to government cloud computing infrastructure.
