DENVER, Colo., Nov. 20 — The iRODS Consortium today announced that DataDirect Networks (DDN), a leading provider of high performance, high capacity, scalable storage systems for big data, has become its first private sector member.

The iRODS Consortium formed about a year ago with RENCI (the Renaissance Computing Institute at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill) and Germany’s Max Planck Society as its founding members. The consortium works to bring together universities, research organizations, businesses, and government agencies to guide the continued development of the iRODS (integrated Rule-Oriented Data System) data management platform, obtain funding to support that development, and broaden the iRODS user community.

iRODS is a popular, highly-configurable, open source technology used in multiple high-demand production sites globally for data management, sharing and integration. It was developed by the Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) Group at UNC-Chapel Hill and the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). RENCI software developers work with DICE on continued development and improvement of iRODS.

“DDN has been a long standing supporter of iRODs development for several years and we’re pleased to now join the iRODS consortium,” said Dave Fellinger, chief scientist, DDN. “For our customers involved in multidisciplinary research, robust data management and collaboration tools are essential. However, organizing, sharing, and finding collections of data in file systems maintained by dozens or even hundreds of different organizations can be costly and time consuming. Our continued work in coupling applications like iRODS with our storage systems will enable our customers to accelerate time to discovery and collaboration with a converged infrastructure solution that lays the foundation for much larger data sets as we move toward exascale deployments.”

DICE and RENCI are currently working to merge branches of iRODS into a single, sustainable and production-oriented product. The new iRODS 4.0 will be introduced in March 2014, and the planned merger is a main focus of presentations in the RENCI booth at SC13 (#4305) and will be one of the highlights of an iRODS Consortium reception to be held from 5 p.m. – 7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 20, in the Governor’s Square Room at the Sheraton Denver Downtown, 1550 Court Place. The reception will also feature an overview of the iRODS framework, use cases presented by iRODS users, and information about membership in the iRODS Consortium. The reception is open to all SC attendees on a first-come, first-served basis and will include hot and cold hors d’oeuvres and a cash bar.

“As a leading developer of massively scalable storage for big data and cloud applications, DDN is a perfect fit for the iRODS Consortium, and we look forward to the valuable contributions they will make to our efforts,” said Brand Fornter, executive director of the iRODS Consortium. “The consortium and DDN share the goal of wanting to meet the needs of researchers and businesses who struggle to manage and store ever-growing data sets.”

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Source: iRODS Consortium