Executive Summary

Purpose of this report

This report assesses the current state and future direction of virtual store technology for NASA data. It documents mature implementations, developing approaches, known limitations, governance gaps, and recommended next steps.

Summary of recommendations and current state

The performance of legacy scientific data formats is poor in a cloud environment, yet reprocessing or copying the full NASA archive is not feasible. Virtual stores address both problems: they provide cloud-optimized access via Zarr to existing data, without duplication.

Virtual store technology is ready for production use with consistently gridded data and is actively being developed for more complex data types.

Key recommendations include:

• adopting Icechunk (see Technical Overview)
• adopting the GeoZarr standard (see Technical Overview)
• planning for integration with other NASA services, such as EGIS and Harmony (see NASA Ecosystem), and,
• addressing governance gaps, specifically standardizing CMR metadata approaches (see Governance)

See the Recommendations section for the full summary.