Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has built a private cloud based on Red Hat OpenStack Platform, saving significant time and resources spent on datacenters by retooling and consolidating their in-house hardware. JPL, NASA’s primary center for robotic exploration of the solar system, used Red Hat’s OpenStack and Linux technology to modernize its on-premise storage and server capacity, giving them the ability to support hundreds of JPL mission scientists and engineers.

NASA’s JPL has led many significant achievements in space exploration, from creating America’s first satellite to sending a spacecraft to every planet in the solar system and launching all four of the Mars rovers. Today, these exploratory missions rely more significantly on cloud computing capabilities to process requests from flight projects and researchers working with mission data. Traditionally, most of JPL’s infrastructure was housed in on-site server hardware.

JPL engineers built an on-site OpenStack cloud for the large and flexible cloud computing capacity they could offer mission scientists and engineers, planning to move critical compute activities that needed to be on-site into a more efficient private cloud architecture.

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 Amazon Web Services (AWS), when necessary for peak demand. Red Hat’s experience from long-term participation in the OpenStack Foundation and key upstream contributions to specific platform projects made them a well-suited partner for JPL.

Red Hat is an OpenStack leader - both in contributions to the upstream OpenStack community and its work to deliver a production-ready OpenStack platform to enterprise customers. Red Hat OpenStack Platform, a highly scalable, production-ready Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution, has emerged as an open source cloud platform of choice for a growing number of global organizations. Co-engineered with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and backed by Red Hat's support lifecycle, Red Hat OpenStack Platform offers an open foundation for cloud deployments.

“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. 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 datacenter footprint.”  -- Radhesh Balakrishnan, General Manager, OpenStack, Red Hat