June 11, 2019

HSM User Conference 2019 – Archiving Big Data

The 2019 HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management) User Conference took place at Ulrichshusen manor from 5 to 7 June. This event brought over 50 experts from Germany, Austria and the USA to the Mecklenburgische Seenplatte, a lake district in northern Germany, to learn first-hand about special software solutions for managing large data archives.

Organised by DFD Neustrelitz to take place every two years, the HSM Conference has an 18-year tradition. It gives developers and users an opportunity to inform themselves about the latest software developments and dealer strategies, and in idyllic surroundings to share their experience in detail.

The thematic focus of this year's HSM User Conference was on the migration of very large data inventories and the optimal allocation of the data to a variety of storage media as well as to the cloud. An intensively discussed topic was the surprising product strategy change put into practice by the Oracle company. It requires a complete exchange of software for petabyte-size archives. This is a challenge also facing other earth observation archives (at DLR, ESA, GFZ, USGS).

Because of developments anticipated for the next few years and the positive response to this year's conference, many of the participants have already expressed their interest in attending both biennially alternating events, the Storage Conference (2020) and the next HSM User Conference (2021).