CHAPEL HILL, NC – The iRODS Consortium has launched two new services to support the continued growth of its strong, dynamic user and developer communities.
iRODS—the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System—is free open source data management software that helps organizations control massive amounts of unstructured data by providing capabilities including automated organization, archiving, access control, auditing, and search. The iRODS Consortium is a membership organization that supports ongoing iRODS development. It is based at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The iRODS Partner Program assists iRODS users who need help installing and configuring iRODS by connecting them with companies that have experience deploying iRODS in production settings. The iRODS Consortium will continue to provide support to users through its engineering staff, particularly for cases that require advanced interaction with the iRODS code base. The iRODS Partner Program expands on these support capabilities with options for domain-specific and enterprise-grade service.
“Already, we have iRODS partners with expertise in the life sciences, media and entertainment, and government data management spaces,” said Dan Bedard, interim executive director of the iRODS Consortium. “And very soon we will have a partner who can provide 24/7 global support, directly backed by the Consortium core development team. The iRODS Partner Program is win-win-win. It helps the growing community of iRODS users get the most value out of our software, it provides commercial opportunities for our partners, and it is a force multiplier for the iRODS Consortium staff. ”
The iRODS Partner Program has two levels of participation. Gold Partners are Consortium members, and they provide support that leverages training and fallback assistance from Consortium staff. Standard Partners have registered with the Consortium as iRODS solution and service providers. Current partners are Daystrom Technology Group, Distributed Bio, and Metadata Technology North America (MTNA). To learn more about the iRODS Partners Program, or to contact a partner, see http://irods.org/partners/.
iRODS Hub: An App Store for iRODS
The growing iRODS user developer community now has a place to share software written for iRODS: iRODS Hub (http://irods.org/hub/). On this site, users and developers can link to their plugins, rules, documentation, tutorials, links, videos, and more, so they can be shared with other users who could benefit from using them.
“iRODS Hub highlights a key technology built into iRODS 4: the pluggable architecture,” said iRODS Consortium Chief Technologist Jason Coposky. “Plugins make it easier than ever to connect iRODS to new storage systems, new authentication methods, and new programming languages. Through the Hub, iRODS developers can easily show off the plugins they’ve written, as well as iRODS rules, clients, documentation, and other work they’ve done. As our community grows, iRODS Hub will help new users configure their deployments quickly and easily. And because iRODS is so flexible, as the resources available through the Hub grow, the possible uses for iRODS can grow just as quickly.”
About the iRODS Consortium
The iRODS Consortium is a membership organization that supports the development of the Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS), free open source data management software for data discovery, workflow automation, secure collaboration, and storage virtualization. The iRODS Consortium provides a production-ready iRODS distribution and iRODS support and professional integration services. The world’s top researchers in life sciences, geosciences, and information management use iRODS to control their data. Learn more at irods.org.
The iRODS Consortium is administered by founding member RENCI, a research institute for applications of advanced technologies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For more on RENCI, see renci.org.
