In January 2021, GÉANT signed a contract as part of its Single Point of Contact (SPOC) project with EUMETSAT (European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites), which monitors weather, climate and the environment from space.
Thanks to this new agreement, EUMETSAT will receive connectivity at the EUMETSAT Back Up Control Centre (BUCC) location in Madrid, Spain utilising the GÉANT R&E network. The connectivity bandwidth requirement was agreed for 2 x 1 Gbps circuits on different routes. In the agreement, GÉANT’s role is to procure, provision and test the new links, and, once accepted, to support them operationally as part of the ‘one-stop-shop’ model.
Building upon the existing GÉANT infrastructure, GÉANT will build and manage the deployment of two diversely routed circuits between the BUCC and the RedIRIS (the Spanish NREN) Point Of Presence in Madrid. The first circuit is already in production, while the second will be delivered by April 2021. Both circuits will physically terminate on separate switches within RedIRIS, which will provide the IP service.
In order to extend the connectivity to BUCC, GÉANT also procured and now manage a third-party Ethernet link between a BUCC edge device and the RedIRIS router in Madrid as part of the service solution. Dual 1 Gbps unprotected options were chosen.
GÉANT has a long-standing relationship with EUMETSAT, having been working closely to disseminate scientific data from EUMETSAT to the rest of the world using the research and education networks since 2014. This relationship entered a new phase in early 2020 with the signing of a new frame contract to deliver services as part of the SPOC project.
The renewed collaboration between the two parties will be beneficial to the Research and Education (R&E) community globally by ensuring the continuity of operations for EUMETSAT.
“GÉANT is an important partner that supports EUMETSAT’s mission to deliver critical meteorology data to our Member States, partner organisations and users. This new contract ensures that our backup control centre will be efficiently connected to our data network, thus strengthening the resilience of our operations in the event of a problem at our headquarters in Darmstadt.”- Livio Mastroddi, Director of Operations and Services to Users, EUMETSAT.
“We are pleased to further develop our relationship with our long-term partner EUMETSAT and we warmly welcome it as an opportunity to contribute to weather data distribution with the infrastructure provided by GÉANT and the national research and education networks. We expect that this new agreement will help improve the overall service offer that the R&E networking community is able to offer to EUMETSAT through the newly expanded network connectivity.” – Erik Huizer, CEO of GÉANT.
About EUMETSAT
EUMETSAT is the European operational satellite agency for monitoring weather, climate and the environment from space. An intergovernmental organisation based in Darmstadt, Germany, the agency currently has 30 Member States. EUMETSAT operates the geostationary satellites Meteosat -9, -10 and -11 over Europe and Africa, and Meteosat-8 over the Indian Ocean. The data and products from EUMETSAT’s satellites are vital to weather forecasting and make a significant contribution to the monitoring of the environment and climate change. Read more on www.eumetsat.int
This article was first published on 23 March by GÉANT.
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