The NASA lab responsible for building the Mars rovers and robotic probes to scout the solar system has begun using an open-source cloud platform to house its mission-critical data.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab has retooled its existing hardware to support a Red Hat OpenStack cloud platform that will manage new flight projects, centralize research and reduce the need to keep funding legacy systems, according to Red Hat.
“NASA JPL is at the forefront of technology-powered innovation and we’re excited about the computing capacity needed for their exploratory missions being powered by Red Hat OpenStack Platform,” Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager at Red Hat. said in a statement.
“This is a testament to the reliability, availability and scalability offered by a fully open cloud infrastructure.”
The announcement came Monday at the OpenStack Summit in Austin, Texas, where IT leaders from more than 50 countries are gathered to exchange best cloud practices.
Launched in 2010, OpenStack is a free, open source cloud platform deployed primarily as an infrastructure-as-a-service. Adopting it as a data management platform will allow NASA scientists to tap into a private cloud and even to use external cloud resources when the demand exceeds local capability.
“We are proud of the partnership with NASA JPL to address their needs for an agile infrastructure to meet their projected growth, while helping to reduce the datacenter footprint,” said Balakrishnan.
