European Bioinformatics Institute chooses Red Hat OpenStack

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published 3 February 2017

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), has announced it's using Red Hat's OpenStack Platform to drive forward its collaborative research project, known as the Embassy Cloud.

The project's aim is to collaborate with researchers worldwide on life science experiments to find the answers to many worldwide problems, such as pan-cancer analysis.

EMBL-EBI needed to find a platform that could scale dramatically to respond to the greater data demands it was experiencing. The organisation was previously using VMware’s vCloud, but it needed a more responsive solution and because the EBI has already been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it decided to look at other solutions Red Hat offered.

"Many global research collaborations would not be possible without the functionality of Embassy Cloud," Steven Newhouse, head of Technical Services at EMBL-EBI said. "We are now using the Red Hat OpenStack Platform to support these collaborations - it has the flexibility and scalability needed to allow people working on different projects, in different locations, to access the information they need, as and when they need it."

As well as being an open standard in the research community, EBI knew Red Hat's OpenStack could deliver the scalable, flexible cloud platform needed to process the worldwide research. With local IT teams available to offer support to all of the research institution's in-house teams when they need it, it also meets the EBI's global footprint.

“It’s an honor to work closely with EMBL-EBI, whose collaborative and open approach to solving some of the world’s most challenging problems strongly resonates with the Red Hat approach to transforming enterprise IT," Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager of OpenStack, Red Hat added.

"We’re excited about role of open source solutions and in particular, production-ready Red Hat OpenStack Platform, in helping to truly define and accelerate the future of science and discovery.”

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