The North Sea is a web of busy shipping routes, wind farms and subsea infrastructure. Laying new cables, clearing explosives, placing wind turbines: none of it happens without detailed knowledge of the seabed. Maritime service provider N-Sea delivers exactly that. Their specialised vessels collect huge volumes of data with advanced sonar and survey systems. But how do you store hundreds of terabytes per project without drowning in a mess of files and hardware?
Exponential data growth
N-Sea provides end-to-end solutions for subsea infrastructure and assets in the offshore energy sector. That covers surveys, UXO detection and removal, inspection, repair and maintenance (IRM), construction and decommissioning, and data management. They process terabytes of data per project. And that volume keeps growing.
Manual data offloading and costly consulting services
Growing data volumes pushed N-Sea to the limits of its storage capacity, making manual data offloading to the cloud a necessity. This was a time-consuming process that took up to three months to complete and introduced additional workload and operational risks. As the existing storage solution approached end-of-life, N-Sea increasingly relied on external consultants to maintain and support the environment, driving up costs and increasing dependency on third parties. This forced the company to make a strategic decision: reinvest in a traditional on-premises solution or transition to a Private Cloud model that offered greater flexibility and scalability
Flexible infrastructure with intelligent data tiering
N-Sea chose to partner with Eurofiber Cloud Infra and adopt its Private Cloud solution, creating a future-proof and scalable storage infrastructure. “What N-Sea needed was a layered storage solution that could grow alongside its data volumes without limiting future expansion,” said Jos Hoogers, Senior Enterprise Cloud Account Manager at Eurofiber Cloud Infra.
A key part of the new architecture is a 'hot-warm-cold' storage model, which segments data based on the required data classification. N-Sea stores its most current data in the colocation environment at the Eurofiber Cloud Infra data centre, after which it's synced to the on-premises environment at its office in Dordrecht. This 'hot storage' is meant for ongoing projects and real-time data processing.
Object storage environment
Completed projects are moved to the warm storage tier in the private cloud. This is an object storage environment provided by Eurofiber Cloud Infra, used for additional analysis and trend research. The storage service is backed by a technical SLA, allowing N-Sea to rely on high availability without having to manage the underlying infrastructure. Usage is billed based on the number of terabytes stored per month. The third tier is cold storage, where older data is automatically transferred to Oracle Cloud Archive Storage for long-term retention and historical insights in line with defined retention periods.
“Data offloading used to consume a significant amount of time that could have been better spent elsewhere,” says Adriaan Holleman, Head of IT at the N-Sea Group. “Today, the process runs automatically, giving us full control over our data ecosystem while increasing our capacity for innovation.”
According to Holleman, the move to a private cloud has also delivered major scalability benefits. While the previous infrastructure offered limited expansion options, the new solution enables storage capacity to grow flexibly alongside operational requirements. “If we generate twice as much data tomorrow, we can scale up effortlessly without major investments,” Holleman explains.
The benefits
- Scaling without capital investment. Storage capacity grows along with demand, no big hardware spend, so N-Sea can stay focused on its core work.
- Lower, more predictable costs. N-Sea pays only for the capacity it actually uses. No surprise hardware bills, no external consultants.
- Less IT management. Automation cuts manual work, which lowers the risk of errors. The IT team spends that time on innovation and process improvement instead.
- Better data security and compliance. "Clients demand speed and availability, but also guarantees that their data is stored safely," says Hoogers. "With this solution we manage data in a controlled way and meet compliance requirements, without compromising on what users need."
Thanks to the streamlined storage architecture, data exchange is now more secure, efficient, and reliable, without the risk of inconsistencies or data loss. This enables N-Sea to focus entirely on its core operations, supported by an infrastructure that scales with the company’s growth. With Eurofiber Cloud Infra, the path is clear for a data-driven future without obstacles, no matter how challenging the waters ahead may be.
