Mirantis Case Studies Leading Dutch Biodiversity Institute Transforms Scientific Computing, Welcomes Third Party Research Collaboration

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	Leading Dutch Biodiversity Institute Transforms Scientific Computing, Welcomes Third Party Research Collaboration Mirantis

Leading Dutch Biodiversity Institute Transforms Scientific Computing, Welcomes Third Party Research Collaboration

Mirantis

Technology Category	Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Industries	Education Life Sciences
Applicable Functions	Product Research & Development Quality Assurance
Services	Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services Data Science Services System Integration
Challenge	Over the last few years, the Naturalis Biodiversity Center has expanded to meet the growing needs of the scientific community. To better serve the community, the Center combined previously separate organizations, including a thriving natural history museum, and quickly became a 700-person entity, with 100 resident scientists, 200 guest researchers, and an IT staff of 35 to support these professionals. Additionally, a 30 million Euro grant from the Dutch Economic Structure Enhancement Fund allowed expansion of state-of-the-art laboratories and research collaboration, and the initiation of one of the world’s largest projects for natural history digitization to date. Concurrently, DNA sequencing, 3D, and GIS technologies led to the proliferation of scientists’ data sets. Combined with the trend to analyze relationships between species, the Center required more scalable and powerful compute resources. By the end of 2013, the Center’s IT department had consolidated resources and was ready to address its systems’ constraints to support the next phase of organizational growth. Read More
About Customer	Research experts around the world exploring plant and animal sustainability are now taking note of the scientific resources of the Naturalis Biodiversity Center. The Netherlands based Center recently expanded third party access to its 37 million natural history object catalog to promote species’ wellbeing and the planet’s future. Through collaboration with universities and partner institutes, the government funded Center now has one of the largest collections of data to analyze biological and geological diversity, as well as endangered species and address the threat of extinction. To accelerate groundbreaking research, this information, housed on the Center’s scalable, high performance OpenStack cloud, is now accessible to the scientific community through a published application program interface (API). If they don’t know about it already, every scientist collecting, conserving or studying organisms across the globe should discover the Naturalis Biodiversity Center – the single center of expertise for pooling knowledge on species and evolution. Read More
Solution	In early 2014, a project team was formed and the members began their search for open source cloud technologies and quickly found the OpenStack technologies and community to be an attractive answer. The team downloaded and installed an OpenStack cloud and were satisfied with its functionality but concerned about maintaining its growth. The team then learned of Mirantis’ strong expertise as a pure-play, vendor agnostic provider of OpenStack distribution and services, and contacted the organization. Using Mirantis’ reference architecture and documentation, the group educated themselves on the technology and built themselves a small working system. Satisfied with the initial system, the team gained additional OpenStack knowledge and expanded the cloud to accommodate multiple workloads – high performance compute for research scientists, storage for the digitized catalog , and web servers for data sharing. The Naturalis IT team used the OpenStack Fuel tool, included in the Mirantis OpenStack distribution, to deploy and manage all components of their cloud, and Puppet for configuration management. With expansion, Intel based systems were moved to commercial data centers in Delft and Amsterdam in a high availability configuration. Read More Log in to view content
Contents

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services

Applicable Industries

Education

Life Sciences

Applicable Functions

Product Research & Development

Quality Assurance

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

Data Science Services

System Integration

Challenge

Over the last few years, the Naturalis Biodiversity Center has expanded to meet the growing needs of the scientific community. To better serve the community, the Center combined previously separate organizations, including a thriving natural history museum, and quickly became a 700-person entity, with 100 resident scientists, 200 guest researchers, and an IT staff of 35 to support these professionals. Additionally, a 30 million Euro grant from the Dutch Economic Structure Enhancement Fund allowed expansion of state-of-the-art laboratories and research collaboration, and the initiation of one of the world’s largest projects for natural history digitization to date. Concurrently, DNA sequencing, 3D, and GIS technologies led to the proliferation of scientists’ data sets. Combined with the trend to analyze relationships between species, the Center required more scalable and powerful compute resources. By the end of 2013, the Center’s IT department had consolidated resources and was ready to address its systems’ constraints to support the next phase of organizational growth.

About Customer

Research experts around the world exploring plant and animal sustainability are now taking note of the scientific resources of the Naturalis Biodiversity Center. The Netherlands based Center recently expanded third party access to its 37 million natural history object catalog to promote species’ wellbeing and the planet’s future. Through collaboration with universities and partner institutes, the government funded Center now has one of the largest collections of data to analyze biological and geological diversity, as well as endangered species and address the threat of extinction. To accelerate groundbreaking research, this information, housed on the Center’s scalable, high performance OpenStack cloud, is now accessible to the scientific community through a published application program interface (API). If they don’t know about it already, every scientist collecting, conserving or studying organisms across the globe should discover the Naturalis Biodiversity Center – the single center of expertise for pooling knowledge on species and evolution.

Solution

In early 2014, a project team was formed and the members began their search for open source cloud technologies and quickly found the OpenStack technologies and community to be an attractive answer. The team downloaded and installed an OpenStack cloud and were satisfied with its functionality but concerned about maintaining its growth. The team then learned of Mirantis’ strong expertise as a pure-play, vendor agnostic provider of OpenStack distribution and services, and contacted the organization. Using Mirantis’ reference architecture and documentation, the group educated themselves on the technology and built themselves a small working system. Satisfied with the initial system, the team gained additional OpenStack knowledge and expanded the cloud to accommodate multiple workloads – high performance compute for research scientists, storage for the digitized catalog , and web servers for data sharing. The Naturalis IT team used the OpenStack Fuel tool, included in the Mirantis OpenStack distribution, to deploy and manage all components of their cloud, and Puppet for configuration management. With expansion, Intel based systems were moved to commercial data centers in Delft and Amsterdam in a high availability configuration.

Impact #1	As a result of the Mirantis OpenStack deployment, the Center’s scientists have much faster and more democratized access to high performance research systems.
Impact #2	Calculations that previously took weeks are now completed in days or even hours. And researchers have the freedom and control to quickly scale, return, and rebuild resources as needed.
Impact #3	Rapid scaling of storage for digitizing the 37 million object catalog is substantially more efficient and affordable than before the OpenStack and Ceph deployment.

Impact #1

As a result of the Mirantis OpenStack deployment, the Center’s scientists have much faster and more democratized access to high performance research systems.

Impact #2

Calculations that previously took weeks are now completed in days or even hours. And researchers have the freedom and control to quickly scale, return, and rebuild resources as needed.

Impact #3

Rapid scaling of storage for digitizing the 37 million object catalog is substantially more efficient and affordable than before the OpenStack and Ceph deployment.

Benefit #1	10x faster research calculations – from weeks to days
Benefit #2	Increase in efficiency of data storage and file backup
Benefit #3	10-minute provisioning of new web servers

Benefit #1

10x faster research calculations – from weeks to days

Benefit #2

Increase in efficiency of data storage and file backup

Benefit #3

10-minute provisioning of new web servers

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Overview

Leading Dutch Biodiversity Institute Transforms Scientific Computing, Welcomes Third Party Research Collaboration

Operational Impact

Quantitative Benefit