WANdisco Stars in Discovery of New Planets!

Solar System Discovered by the European Southern Observatory

“In the past, we encountered problems such as not being able to access the server and extremely slow downloads over the network from Munich,” said Erik Allaert for ESO.

The software powering the world's most productive astronomical observatory has improved dramatically in recent months and this is largely attributed to the selection of WANdisco.

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) builds and operates a suite of the world’s most advanced ground-based telescopes and is recognised as the world’s most productive astronomical observatory. ESO provides state-of-the-art research facilities to astronomers and astrophysicists and is supported by Austria, Belgium, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

The software powering the world's most productive astronomical observatory has improved dramatically in recent months and this is largely attributed to the selection of WANdisco, a supplier of distributed source code management solutions, based on Open Source Apache Subversion. The move to WANDisco has reportedly helped ESO to eliminate downtime and overcome slow and unreliable networks between development sites spread across four continents here on Earth. In line with this, ESO selected WANdisco to support its developers based in Chile, New Mexico, Canada, Scotland, Germany and Japan.

ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in the Atacama Desert region of Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. ESO's first site is at La Silla, a 2400 m high mountain 600 km north of Santiago de Chile. It is equipped with several optical telescopes with mirror diameters of up to 3.6 metres. In September 2010, ESO found what is believed to be the richest system of exoplanets ever discovered outside our own solar system – at least five planets orbiting a star named HD10180, located 127 light years away in the southern constellation of Hydrus.

One of ESO's key projects is developing the ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) — a state-of-the-art telescope located some 5000 meters above sea level in the Chilean Andes that studies light from some of the coldest objects in the universe. The software developers working on this project are based at ALMA and other sites scattered across the globe. Prior to WANdisco, they all accessed a single CVS server in Munich, Germany. Network performance and reliability were major problems and downtime was frequent, particularly at the ALMA site. Due to ALMA's remote location the only access is a high latency, low throughput satellite connection.

“In the past, we encountered problems such as not being able to access the server and extremely slow downloads over the network from Munich,” said Erik Allaert, European Divisional Software Manager for ESO. “Thanks to WANdisco we now have LAN-speed performance for all of our developers, whether they are based in Canada, Scotland, Japan or Chile, and there's no downtime. Every site has local access – developers anywhere can do their own builds and all users have the latest changes from everywhere else. Our build cycles have been reduced dramatically, and productivity has gone way up.”

Since implementing WANDisco, ESO has been able to provide users in Chile, Europe, North America and Japan with LAN-speed access to the repository; reduced software build cycles from over two hours to 10 minutes, increased productivity; providing users at every remote site with the latest changes immediately and simultaneously; with zero downtime.

More information at www.wandisco.com