Red Hat has announced that the European Space Agency (ESA) has developed an on-premises, private cloud infrastructure that offers advanced IT services for the agency’s user communities. The infrastructure partially uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Due to significantly different requirements for the ESA project, Red Hat Consulting worked closely with ESA during the implementation and customisation of the Red Hat operating system.
Complex virtual environments can now be provisioned within minutes directly by the end users as opposed to months. Additionally the ESA IT team can now monitor computing resources consumed by its users in real time.
Josè Fernandez Balseiro, technical officer and project manager for the ESA Private Cloud said: "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."
"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."
ESA’s employees and service providers manage the IT infrastructure and services necessary for everyday corporate activities and offer advanced solutions to restricted groups of power users who need the highest levels of service availability. The agency’s IT department has to support users operating across Europe who need specific applications, which along with their data must be available at all times.
In order to meet these requirements, ESA has developed a private cloud infrastructure, ESA Cloud. Based on VCE systems, on a blade x86 architecture, it is managed entirely by Orange Business Services, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux as one of the platforms supported in the ESA Cloud.
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Gianni Anguilletti, country manager, Italy, Red Hat said: "The European Space Agency has a very unique set of requirements, which are difficult to be matched by any other organization in the world. Specifically, the technology platforms they choose need to be highly reliable and flexible, as well as consistently delivering excellent performance."
"The choice made by ESA highlights once again that Red Hat solutions can be a cornerstone of the most critical infrastructures of the market." Concluded Anguilletti.
Software development and testing environments along with Satellite data reprocessing environments and document management systems are among some of the services and environments in the ESA cloud.
