Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, announced that the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, will use the Red Hat OpenStack platform to provide the scale and flexibility required to advance international research collaboration. The purpose of this cloud is to change the way in which collaborative research - such as Pan-Cancer Analysis designed to examine the similarities and differences in genetic and cellular changes that exist across tumor types - faces the most difficult biological challenges in the world.
The Institute provides freely available data from life science experiments to researchers worldwide. On a daily average, more than 16 million requests for the use of data are received on the Institute's websites. The institute actively encourages active collaboration, inspires new research, and provides advanced bioinformatics training to scientists at all levels. The institute is increasingly working on providing a common IT infrastructure, on which research organizations of all sizes can work.
The life sciences industry has a long tradition of collaboration. However, modern research requires access to huge data sets, and not every research institute has the resources to generate the necessary computing power. Embassy Cloud provides, within the EMBL-EBI infrastructure, more secure private workspaces based on a virtual machine, where researchers can optimally use workflows, applications and datasets customized to them.
The Institute has a long-standing relationship with Red Hat, having used Red Hat Enterprise Linux for several years. The institute previously used vCloud of VMware for its Embassy Cloud, but needed an alternative solution that would allow IT resources to be scaled- his dramatically, up and down, as needed. Recognizing OpenStack as an accepted standard in the research community, EMBL-EBI moved to the Red Hat OpenStack platform, to provide a scalable and flexible cloud platform that will support its goal of improving global collaborations in research.
The institute considered two main factors when deciding on the migration: a platform that must work seamlessly with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and a vendor that must provide local support on the ground in Europe. The vendor's local IT teams must be available to provide training and technical assistance to the Institute's internal teams, whenever and wherever required. Red Hat met both requirements.
Today, EMBL-EBI has several entities using its Embassy Cloud, including non-profit research institutions and pharmaceutical companies. The scalability that Red Hat solutions enable in this environment has already helped to increase support for research activities from 2,000 cores to 4,000 cores. Plans are to scale Embassy Cloud to 6,000 cores and four petabytes of storage.
Stephen Newhouse, Head of Technical Services at EMBL-EBI, said: “Many global research collaborations would not be possible without the functionality of Embassy Cloud. We now use the Red Hat OpenStack platform to support these collaborations. It has the necessary flexibility and scalability to allow people to work on different projects in different places, and to access the information they need as and when they need it."
Radhash Balakrishnan, General Manager of OpenStack at Red Hat, said: "It is a great honor to work closely with EMBL-EBI, whose collaborative and open approach to solving some of the world's most challenging problems aligns well with Red Hat's approach to enterprise IT transformation. We are happy about the role of open source solutions, and especially the production-ready Red Hat OpenStack platform, in helping to define and accelerate the future of science and discovery."
