The iRODS Consortium, the foundation that leads development and support of the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) data management software, welcomes OpenIO as its newest Consortium member.
OpenIO is a software-defined, open source object storage solution designed for big data and artificial intelligence applications. OpenIO scales easily while delivering consistent performance and can be deployed on-premise, cloud-hosted or at the edge, and on any hardware mix that customers choose.
iRODS is free open source software for data discovery, workflow automation, secure collaboration, and data virtualization used by research and business organizations around the globe. iRODS allows users to automate data management by creating a unified namespace and a metadata catalog of all the data and users within the storage environment.
“High-performance storage solutions like OpenIO derive a great deal of value from iRODS’ ability to efficiently organize data,” said Jason Coposky, Executive Director, iRODS Consortium. “Due to their focus on open source, our organizations’ goals are well aligned. Given that, we are well positioned to closely integrate iRODS and OpenIO as a competitive solution, which will benefit the broader open source community.”
OpenIO plans to use iRODS to orchestrate the movement of data while taking advantage of all of the performance benefits and features of the OpenIO storage solution. Given iRODS’ strong track record managing academic research data, OpenIO Co-Founder and CTO Jean-François Smigielski also sees the collaboration as an opportunity to enhance OpenIO’s ability to address the needs of academic researchers through an integration with iRODS.
“OpenIO is an open core solution and we are firm believers in open source technology,” said Smigielski. “We decided to become an iRODS Consortium member because iRODS has the same open source philosophy, and because of the strong link that exists between storage tiers and orchestrators. We wish to work closely with iRODS so that we can take advantage of their evolving features and technology, which will enable OpenIO to propose new and innovative features as early as possible.”
The iRODS Consortium guides development and support of iRODS, along with providing production-ready iRODS distribution and iRODS professional integration services, training, and support. The consortium is administered by founding member RENCI, a research institute for applications of cyberinfrastructure located at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In addition to OpenIO, current members of the iRODS Consortium include Agriculture Victoria, Bayer, Cloudian, University of Colorado, Boulder, DataDirect Networks, Maastricht University, MSC, the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, NetApp, Quantum, RENCI, SURF, the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing, SUSE, Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), University College London, University of Groningen, Utrecht University, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and Western Digital.
