Rackspace and Cern Unite OpenStack Clouds for Scientific Discovery

Two years after signing a contributor agreement with Cern openlab to deliver a massive OpenStack-powered hybrid cloud solution, Rackspace announced an extension of that agreement to continue work in creating a reference architecture and operational model for federated cloud services.

Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research and Rackspace partner to support CERNs large computing environment, and just this week witnessed the culmination of some of that work with the announcement at the Vancouver OpenStack summit for broad support for OpenStack Identity Federation.

Rackspace says the next iteration for the Cern openlab is to extend the federation concept to developing standardized templates for full multi-cloud, open standard orchestration capability, which they expect will enable customers to spin up an environment across multiple cloud platforms with a single action.

For its part, Rackspace will fund a research fellow at Cern, to help with the federation project as well as provide services and remote assistance in design and implementation from Rackspace’s product teams. Cern in turn will be using Rackspace Public Cloud and OnMetal services for testing. Just as the work these two did over the first phase of project was contributed to OpenStack, the next phase is expected to give back to OpenStack Heat orchestration, Glance image, Keystone service catalog and Nova compute projects.

"Our CERN openlab mission is to work with industry partners to develop open, standard solutions to the challenges faced by the worldwide LHC community. These solutions also often play a key role in addressing tomorrow's business challenges," said Tim Bell, infrastructure manager in the IT department at CERN. "After our work on identity federation with Rackspace, this is a very important step forward. For CERN, being able to move compute workloads around the world is essential for ongoing collaboration and discovery."

Earlier this spring Seagate announced that it was also partnering with Cern openlab to help manage the 100 petabytes of data that the Large Hadron Collider has generated to date. Using the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform will enable Cern to improve performance and save cost by connecting object-oriented applications directly to the storage device, and will allow Seagate to further the open storage platform by testing it in an unparalleled data creation environment.