News / 18 July 2019

SUSE joins the iRODS Consortium



The iRODS Consortium, the foundation that leads development and support of the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) data management software, welcomes SUSE as its newest Consortium member.

iRODS is open source storage data management software for data discovery, workflow automation, secure collaboration, and data virtualization. By creating a unified namespace and a metadata catalog of all the data and users within a storage environment, the iRODS rule engine allows users to automate data management.

iRODS easily integrates with SUSE Enterprise Storage, powered by Ceph technology, enabling users to take control of their data, regardless of where and on what device the data is stored by integrating multiple storage tiers into a single storage cluster. As the newest iRODS Consortium member, SUSE will help direct the technology and governance of iRODS and will participate in the development and testing of the software, which is used by research and business organizations around the globe.

"SUSE has a rich history of Linux distribution and open source support, and partnering with them will allow iRODS to make even deeper connections throughout the open source community," said Jason Coposky, Executive Director, iRODS Consortium. "SUSE Enterprise Storage integrated with iRODS’ data management capabilities creates a compelling and comprehensive solution stack."

Alan Clark, SUSE CTO Office lead focused on Industry Initiatives and Emerging Standards and chairman of the OpenStack Foundation board of directors, said, "SUSE is excited to join the iRODS Consortium, lending our open source technical expertise to help advance the iRODS data management software. The integration with SUSE Enterprise Storage helps customers lower total cost of ownership, leveraging commodity hardware to support their iRODS-managed storage environments. As a leading provider of open source software, SUSE helps our customers leverage the latest open source technologies for application delivery and software-defined infrastructure. SUSE tests and hardens our solutions, ensuring they are enterprise ready and backed by our superior support experience."

The iRODS Consortium guides development and support of iRODS, along with providing 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.

In addition to SUSE, current members of the iRODS Consortium include Bayer, Cloudian, CU Boulder Research Computing, DataDirect Networks, Maastricht University, MSC, the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, NetApp, Quantum, RENCI, SURF, the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing, SUSE, Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), University College London, University of Groningen, Utrecht University, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and Western Digital.


Stephanie Suber