Cleversafe Joins iRODS Consortium

Cleversafe, Inc. will become the ninth member of the iRODS Consortium, a membership-based foundation organized to sustain the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) as free open source data management software.

Cleversafe,  a Chicago-based company, delivers a private cloud platform that solves peabyte-and-beyond storage challenges.

Relied upon by the world’s largest data repositories, Cleversafe reduces 80% or more of storage costs while providing carrier-grade security, 15 nines of reliability, and simplified storage management.

Cleversafe joins a growing list of consortium members who have gathered to collaborate on iRODS, free open source software for data discovery, workflow automation, secure collaboration and data virtualization. The consortium was formed by RENCI (the Renaissance Computing Institute) and the Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) Center, both research institutes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“We recently released the Cleversafe Connector, an iRODS plug-in that provides high performance access to a Cleversafe object store for iRODs data management software,” said Russ Kennedy, Cleversafe’s SVP of product strategy and customer solutions. “We look forward to participating in the iRODS Consortium, as it provides a venue for further collaboration with the core development team and other consortium members. iRODS is an important tool for sharing, managing, and using the vast amounts of data we at Cleversafe enable our customers to store. With the consortium, we look forward to helping to shape the future of this technology.“

Thousands of businesses, research centers, and government agencies worldwide use iRODS to manage critical data in many disciplines and industries, such as genomic medicine (e.g., the Broad Institute and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute); climate research (e.g., NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center and NASA’s Center for Climate Simulation); and seismology (e.g., the Southern California Earthquake Center). Large libraries, such as the French National Library and the Texas Digital Libraries, also use iRODS to control their data.

“Adding Cleversafe to our consortium roster opens up many exciting opportunities for collaboration,” said Dan Bedard, interim executive director, iRODS Consortium. “They bring a technology focus that manages to be both cutting edge and reliable, and with that technology comes a customer base that needs iRODS to take control of their data. I can’t wait to see what we will come up with together to tackle the challenges of managing big data.“

In addition to RENCI, DICE, and Cleversafe, the Consortium includes DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN), EMC Corporation, Seagate Technology plc, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, IBM Corporation, and NASA’s Atmospheric Science Data Center.