Terradepth Offloads Data from the Ocean Depths – While Managing Its Environmental Footprint

by | Jul 6, 2022

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Collecting comprehensive, reliable ocean data is a necessity for the sustainable advancement of a variety of key industries. Gathering immersive, ocean data via autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) can assist with projects in sectors such as clean energy and national security. And they do it with little disruption to the natural ocean environment – AUVs can be deployed and managed in such a way that makes the gathering of data minimally invasive and with a very small carbon footprint compared to traditional means. However, the transfer of that data can be a challenge.

Seagate, a company offering data management and storage solutions with a focus on sustainable partnerships, has worked with many companies to help overcome the challenges of collecting high volumes of data from extreme environments and solve ocean data transfer obstacles.

Terradepth, for example, is one company that faced such challenges. The company provides businesses with comprehensive, high-resolution ocean data collected by AUVs, but it needed a reliable and resilient method of data transfer from the field. The data transfer solution required operations in extreme environments and the ability to handle the massive amounts of geospatial data that their AUVs generate. Additionally, the solution required that the data could be transferred quickly and securely, and for the data to be available from the cloud for customers to review, analyze and take action on their survey results.

Early in its business development phase, Terradepth turned to Seagate to provide its customers with data from the field reliably and securely. Seagate’s Lyve Mobile Array, a data-transfer-as-a-service solution, has enabled Terradepth’s business model of providing extreme-environment, ocean data transfer to industries such as clean energy, national security, and global telecom.

Additionally, Terradepth is aware that the energy consumption of cloud computing has become a key environmental concern. Because the company “aims to empower the protection of our planet and advance the sustainable future of our climate” and wanted the data to be managed by a company that shared its own core values, Terradepth appreciated the fact that Seagate’s commitment to sustainability helped them improve their own environmental footprint.

“They needed a solution to make it easy to collect, share and catalog ocean data so that customers could make immediate use of it. Our Lyve Mobile is designed to solve time to data insight constraints and data logistics requirements,” says Melyssa Banda, Seagate vice president for Lyve Mobile Solutions. “And Seagate is passionate to support companies that have a sustainable mindset at their core.”

Terradepth’s AUVs operate in the most inhospitable spots on the planet, frequently in the most remote ocean depths. Accumulated data from the AUVs is retrieved at the end of a mission via cable connection by operators on land or on surface vessels and is saved to 96-terabyte Lyve Mobile Arrays. The edge-collected data is then transferred in bulk, using a SAS high-speed interface, into a Rackmount Receiver, to Terradepth’s on-premises cloud access point, where it is automatically processed and made viewable. Since this process is energy-intensive, it was important to Terradepth that its partner took dramatic steps to reduce its environmental footprint.

Environmental Benefits

Like every other manufacturer, producing Seagate’s drives uses energy and generates GHGs. As part of the company’s environmental sustainability goals, Seagate works to reduce the amount of energy and carbon required to produce disk drives by identifying energy efficiency opportunities, auditing management systems and performance, and reporting on progress throughout the manufacturing process.

Seagate’s primary objective is to reduce both energy use and GHGs per exabyte of storage the company produces. Its two largest sources of GHG emissions are purchased electricity and “fugitive emissions,” or the unintended release of gases. To drive down GHG emissions intensity, each Seagate manufacturing site is required to achieve annual energy efficiency goals. The company also conducts a third-party verification of its GHG emissions reporting every year and shares the results via the Carbon Disclosure Project Supply Chain and investor questionnaires to continue to assess risk to the business from climate change.

Meanwhile, Terradepth is harnessing the many benefits of implementing Lyve Mobile, especially its subscription-based model, high capacity, and ease of use in the field or, more aptly, out at sea. The company continually refines its services and, by working with Seagate, is able to evolve its own offerings to its customers.

“Terradepth’s unique autonomous maritime system technology enables cost-effective, high-resolution, and accurate data-capture that, when paired with big data analytics and machine learning, offers new insights into our oceans while minimizing human impact,” says Ken Childress, Terradepth chief strategy officer.

By partnering with a company that strives to advance sustainable solutions while addressing critical environmental priorities, Terradepth is able to continue its mission of enhancing humanity’s relationship with the ocean, its ecosystems, and its marine life while rekindling humanity’s connection to the sea.

 

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