News / 05 July 2017

iRODS Consortium welcomes OCF as newest member


UK-based technical support provider will now have a role in future iRODS development

CHAPEL HILL, NC - OCF, an organization that specializes in supporting the data challenges of private and public organizations in the UK, is the latest organization to join the iRODS Consortium, the membership-based foundation that leads development and support of the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS).

Headquartered in Sheffield, England, OCF's in-house experts and network of partners design, integrate, manage and host high performance compute, storage hardware, and analytics software necessary for customers to extract value from their data. The company has a 15-year track record in HPC and managing big data challenges and works with more than 20 percent of the UK's universities, higher education institutes, and research councils. OCF also works with commercial clients in a wide range of industry sectors, including automotive, aerospace, financial, oil and gas, pharmaceutical and utilities.

A key focus for OCF is helping research organizations meet their requirements for long-term storage of vast quantities of research data. As members of the iRODS Consortium, the company will further improve its ability to deliver and support iRODS solutions and will have input into the future development of iRODS to ensure it continues to meet the needs of OCF customers.

"OCF has long followed the development of iRODS in the community and is excited to work with the consortium to take this to the next level," said Andrew Dean, OCF business development manager.

The iRODS Consortium is a membership-based organization that guides development and support of iRODS as free open source software for data discovery, workflow automation, secure collaboration, and data virtualization. The iRODS Consortium provides a production-ready iRODS distribution and iRODS professional integration services, training, and support. The consortium is administered by founding member RENCI, a research institute for applications of cyberinfrastructure located at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA.

"OCF has a history of providing the best data storage and data management solutions to its customers, so having them as a member of the iRODS Consortium is an excellent fit and a relationship that we look forward to building and nurturing," said Jason Coposky, executive director of the iRODS Consortium. "We look forward to their input and participation and are pleased to be part of the data management solutions offered to so many UK organizations."

In addition to OCF, current iRODS Consortium members include Bayer, Dell/EMC, DDN, HGST, IBM, Intel, MSC, the National Institute for Computational Science at the University of Tennessee, Panasas, RENCI, Seagate, University College London, Utrecht University, and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

To learn more about iRODS and the iRODS Consortium, please visit https://irods.org.

To learn more about OCF, please visit http://www.ocf.co.uk.


Karen Green