Cleversafe Joins iRODS Consortium

By Bio-IT World Staff

May 12, 2015 | Cleversafe, a private cloud platform, announced today that it has joined the iRODS Consortium, a membership-based foundation organized to sustain the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) as free open source data management software (see, iRODS: The Metadata Solution to Data Management).

A growing list of consortium members have gathered to collaborate on iRODS, free open source software for data discovery, workflow automation, secure collaboration, and data virtualization. The consortium was formed by RENCI (the Renaissance Computing Institute) and the Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) Center, both research institutes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“We recently released the Cleversafe Connector, an iRODS plugin that provides high performance access to a Cleversafe object store for iRODs data management software,” said Russ Kennedy, Cleversafe’s senior vice president of Product Strategy and Customer Solutions in a statement. “We look forward to participating in the iRODS Consortium, as it provides a venue for further collaboration with the core development team and other consortium members. iRODS is an important tool for sharing, managing, and using the vast amounts of data we at Cleversafe enable our customers to store. With the consortium, we look forward to helping to shape the future of this technology.”

Thousands of businesses, research centers, and government agencies worldwide use iRODS to manage critical data in many disciplines and industries, such as genomic medicine (e.g., the Broad Institute and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute); climate research (e.g., NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center and NASA’s Center for Climate Simulation); and seismology (e.g., the Southern California Earthquake Center). Large libraries, such as the French National Library and the Texas Digital Libraries, also use iRODS to control their data.

“Adding Cleversafe to our consortium roster opens up many exciting opportunities for collaboration,” said Dan Bedard, Interim Executive Director of the iRODS Consortium in the same statement. “They bring a technology focus that manages to be both cutting edge and reliable, and with that technology comes a customer base that needs iRODS to take control of their data. I can’t wait to see what we will come up with together to tackle the challenges of managing big data.”

In addition to RENCI, DICE, and Cleversafe, the Consortium includes DataDirect Networks (DDN), EMC Corporation, Seagate, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, IBM, and NASA’s Atmospheric Science Data Center.