Red Hat Openstack powers Nasa Jet Propulsion Lab's private cloud

Nasa has saved time and money by harnessing OpenStack, says Red Hat

Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has used Red Hat's new OpenStack framework to build its private cloud to help fulfil the growing computing requirements of its space missions, such as the Mars Rovers.

The move was announced to coincide with the OpenStack Summit, and means that Nasa's JPL has access to enterprise-scale computing resources that will enable researchers to tap into their own private cloud and maximise the organisation's server and storage capacity to process flight projects and research data.

The new cloud has been built by JPL's own engineers, but Red Hat said that its experience from long-term participation in the OpenStack Foundation and key upstream contributions to specific platform projects made it well suited as the partner for this collaboration.

The move is not Nasa's first involvement with OpenStack. In fact, the entire OpenStack project grew out of a collaboration between the space agency and hosting firm Rackspace to develop an open source cloud computing platform to help drive the administration's next generation of projects.

Red Hat said that by using its Red Hat OpenStack Platform to build their private cloud, the JPL's engineers managed to save significant time and resources by retooling and consolidating in-house hardware rather than procuring entirely new infrastructure.

"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 meet their needs for an agile infrastructure to meet their projected growth, while helping to reduce the data centre footprint," said Radhesh Balakrishnan, Red Hat's general manager for OpenStack.

Red Hat recently released the latest version of its platform, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8, as well as the Red Hat Cloud Suite which combines its OpenStack build with the OpenShift Enterprise platform-as-a-service layer for running container-based applications and services.