ESA Chooses Red Hat for Private Cloud
The European Space Agency has announced that their new private cloud is largely based on the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform. The ESA, which is the European equivalent of NASA, researched a variety of private cloud solutions before ultimately deciding on the Red Hat operating system. In addition to using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform, the ESA took on technical expertise from Red Hat employees who were sent to Europe in efforts to help build out the ESA’s custom tailored private cloud.
The ESA notes that it must adhere to strict internal service level agreements. Josè Fernandez Balseiro, a project manager for the ESA, highlighted the importance of a resilient private cloud solution by saying, “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.”
One of the more impressive features of the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux based ESA private cloud is its ability to provision server instances within minutes. Previously, the ESA had to wait for physical hardware to be built out in order to gain extra computing power and storage space. Given the scientific nature of the ESA’s endeavors, computing power and storage space for data were in high demand before the cloud migration. With the ESA’s new private cloud, end users can visit a self service portal that will assist them in provisioning a virtual machine that’s available within minutes. The new VM can be completely customized to the needs of the end user through the self service portal. Other noted uses of the ESA’s private cloud are document storage, satellite data processing, provisioning development environments for software engineers and data analysis.
