European Space Agency deploys private cloud with Red Hat
Many of the staff working at the organisation - which spans a number of European countries - require intense use of IT resources, often for limited periods of time.
To meet these data and applications expectations, the ESA created a new internal cloud to support resource delivery, recently going live at one of its two data centres, one in Frascati, Italy, alongside a disaster recovery site in Darmstadt, Germany.
The new infrastructure supports a variety of employee demands, including satellite data reprocessing environments, software development and testing, document management systems, as well as more standard applications.
The ESA said that its cloud platform, called ESA Cloud, allows complex virtual environments to be provisioned within minutes by end users, rather than months, as well as offering more effective monitoring of resources utilisation and chargeback to business units.
It supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux, among other platforms, and runs on a VCE converged infrastructure system - a combination of Cisco, EMC and VMware products. Management of the infrastructure is delivered by Orange Business Services.
"Because of the very unique type of services and applications we have, regulated by rigorous and precise SLAs, technology is absolutely critical to us and we cannot compromise on it in any way," said Jos Fernandez Balseiro, technical officer and project manager for the ESA Private Cloud.
"In order to reach the highest levels of flexibility, the IT department decided to deploy a private cloud. We can say that the Red Hat platform has been an important element in contributing to create our own private cloud, which is crucial for our business and which enables us to offer the most advanced and reliable services for our technical and scientific users."