Design and Empirical Evaluation of a Network-Centric, On-Premises Architecture for Earth Observation Data Access

Abstract: Earth observation (EO) programmes generate data at volumes that exceed the transfer and storage capacity of most institutional networks. Public cloud platforms address this for well-resourced organisations, but institutions across the Atlantic basin face constraints in connectivity, sovereignty and funding that make on-premises infrastructure the only viable path. Cloud-native data formats enable efficient partial reads, yet their performance depends on the bandwidth of the underlying network fabric, a dependency rarely measured in isolation. This paper presents a replicable, network-centric architecture for on-premises EO data access, evaluated at its first operational deployment: the AIR Data Centre, founding node of the Atlantic Cloud. The system comprises a MinIO object storage cluster on a 100 GbE fabric, a PostGIS metadata catalogue and an OGC API-EDR access layer. We characterise the fabric under sustained parallel load, evaluate object storage throughput for EO-representative workloads, and compare measured performance against throttled baselines on identical hardware, isolating network bandwidth as the sole variable. Multi-site replication benchmarks with partner institutions characterise the federation primitive the model depends on. Network bandwidth is the dominant constraint on storage throughput for bulk EO data access up to a threshold; beyond it, endpoint memory topology rather than capacity governs how much bandwidth a system can use. For this hardware class that threshold lies above 10 Gbps per server. Below it, network capacity alone sets what the facility can deliver; above it, the return on further network investment depends on endpoint memory provisioning, which can be deferred and bought later.