iRODS Consortium Welcomes IBM as Latest Member

CHAPEL HILL, N.C., May 28 — IBM is the latest company to join the iRODS Consortium, a membership organization of users and service providers that sustains the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) as free open source data management software.

IBM has signed an agreement that will make the company the ninth member of the consortium. IBM joins DataDirect Networks (DDN), EMC Corporation, Seagate, Cleversafe, the UK-based Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, the Atmospheric Science Data Center at NASA Langley Research Center, the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and the Data Intensive Cyber Environment (DICE) center as members of the two-year-old consortium.

“IBM works with hundreds of hospitals, clinics, and life sciences research organizations to help them use the explosion of health-related data to improve health and operational outcomes,” said Dave Turek, Vice President of HPC Market Engagement at IBM. “We see iRODS as a tool that can help our customers take advantage of all that data—80 percent of which is unstructured and omitted from traditional analysis. Our customers want to unlock knowledge from data and, in keeping with our OpenPOWER strategy and commitment to open source technology, we want to give them open standards-based toolkits for doing that. iRODS is a practical solution for managing, sharing, and preserving these large, unstructured data sets.”

The iRODS Consortium was formed in 2013 by RENCI and DICE, both research institutes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It is administered by RENCI, an institute that builds and deploys technologies to enable scientific discovery and business innovation. iRODS began as a research software package for managing large distributed data sets, and through software development efforts supported by RENCI, DICE, and the iRODS Consortium, it has evolved into open source, enterprise grade software aimed at deployment in mission critical environments.

“IBM is an industry leader in big data and data analytics. They bring years of file system and platform experience to the table at a time when we are continuing to build iRODS as a world class data management framework,” said iRODS Consortium Interim Executive Director Dan Bedard. “iRODS will help IBM provide more value to its customers—in the life sciences space, for research archives, and in countless other areas that are overwhelmed by the deluge of data. In turn, the addition of IBM to the consortium helps us build a more versatile product to serve a rapidly growing iRODS community.”

IBM, and the worldwide community of iRODS users and stakeholders will meet June 10 and 11 in Chapel Hill for their annual User Group Meeting. Go to http://irods.org/ugm2015/ for more information and to register.