Customer Challenge:

NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) is the world’s premier archive of environmental and climate data and data products. NCEI’s data centers in 4 U.S. states store over 25 petabytes of data dating back to colonial times and over 2000 data products available to scientists and the public. To keep up with the expected doubling of its data assets over the decade, NCEI needed to consolidate and modernize their data management IT infrastructure, standardize data management processes and tools, and streamline and simplify data access to be more user-friendly to both scientists and the general public.

ERT Solution and Services:

Through two separate contracts, ERT collaborated with NCEI Government customers to develop and implement solutions and services that addressed NCEI’s data growth challenges and changing user needs. 

Data Lifecycle Management: ERT scientific programmers and database engineers helped lead technology and process improvements to streamline NCEI’s data management lifecycle. We implemented in-line data quality control as part of a common ingest solution; expanded the usability and searchability of NCEI’s metadata to support improved data discovery; and developed and implemented a one-stop data portal to simplify data access and improve server-based data visualization and analysis.

Datacenter Operations: Following ITIL best practices, ERT helped consolidate NCEI’s four datacenters into one integrated enterprise, establishing standard performance targets, reducing the number of different IT management tools and processes, and strengthening the security of NCEI’s IT systems. We identified and implemented new server platforms, virtualization and high performance storage technologies to support researchers’ computing and data storage needs. Our systems engineers and administrators implemented cloud-ready technologies and IT management processes to prepare NCEI for their migration to the cloud.