Ophidia is a CMCC Foundation research project addressing big data challenges for eScience. It provides support for data-intensive analysis exploiting advanced parallel computing techniques and smart data distribution methods. It exploits an array-based storage model and a hierarchical storage organisation to partition and distribute multidimensional scientific datasets over multiple nodes. The Ophidia analytics framework can be exploited in different scientific domains (e.g. Climate Change, Earth Sciences, Life Sciences) and with very heterogeneous sets of data.