NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Is Now Using Red Hat’s OpenStack

Red Hat has announced NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is now a customer of Red Hat’s OpenStack platform.

Despite NASA having been an original founder of OpenStack along with Rackspace in 2010, JPL did not have its own OpenStack distribution.

Private

But now, JPL has built a private cloud on OpenStack to modernise its on-premise storage and server capacity, giving it the ability to support hundreds of JPL mission scientists and engineers.

“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,” said Radhesh Balakrishnan, Red Hat’s OpenStack general manager.

“This is a testament to the reliability, availability and scalability offered by a fully open cloud infrastructure built on Red Hat OpenStack Platform. 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 data centre footprint.”

JPL, which is NASA’s primary centre for robotic exploration of the solar system, already uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) for compute capacity requirements. But JPL engineers built an on-site OpenStack cloud that will coexist with AWS for the large and flexible cloud computing capacity it can offer JPL’s scientists and engineers, planning to move critical compute activities that needed to be on-site into a more efficient private cloud architecture.

As eWeek points out, JPL has in fact been using OpenStack with Red Hat for a little over 18 months now, but today sees the official announcement – most likely as JPL is now in full production after trying OpenStack options from other vendors.

Read: How NASA Would Use Amazon Web Services To Save Matt Damon In ‘The Martian’

Deploying Red Hat OpenStack Platform offers JPL enterprise-scale computing capacity that would enable researchers to tap into their own private cloud and use external cloud resources, such as AWS, when necessary for peak demand, said Red Hat today.

Last week, Red Hat released its Platform 8 Red Hat OpenStack product, alongside announcing the general availability of the Red Hat Cloud Suite. Red Hat is now boasting a comprehensive and integrated hybrid cloud stack, with added container support coming from the company’s OpenShift platform.

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