A global file management system is looking for system integrators in Europe and elsewhere to help get its technology to more commercial customers in various industries.
The iRODS Consortium (see picture) consists of various universities and leading companies in the pharma, biotech, science and supercomputing sectors, for instance, with the software being used at these organisations for some years.
To further popularise the data solution and to generate sales around services for the open source system, Terrell Russell, executive director of the iRODS Consortium, told this week’s IT Press Tour of Boston and Massachusetts: “Companies want service level agreements that we can’t live to, and as an organisation employing nine people, I can’t sign those types of agreements.
“We are looking for system integrators to promote and sell our solution to their customers as part of industry vertical projects.
“With a few of those types of partnerships we’d certainly be up and running in the commercial space. It’s a global file system, so could well become popular. But it takes some learning and we’re not a GUI [graphical user interface] company, and such things cost money to produce, so we can’t make it easy to use and integrate for everyone, ourselves.”
At the moment, existing users build their own GUIs to enable the software to run in their own universities and industry environments. iRODs is a programmable file system, and Russell says his team has helped Consortium members and others to move their data from on-premise to the cloud, and also from the cloud back to on-premise “when their credits have run out”.
He said system integrators could put their own technologies on top of the iRODS platform, which could then be sold as a package, with iRODS getting a cut of the end customer deal, for instance. Russell is also director of data management for RENCI, a unit based out of the University of North Carolina in the US, which helps manage the iRODS system.
The Technology
The software is used at supercomputing centres, in physics environments, libraries and archives, for genomics, bio/pharma, hydrology/weather, medical/imaging, manufacturing, shipping/logistics, and in the automotive sector.
People need the solution for managing large amounts of data across various storage technologies, controlling access to data, searching their data quickly and efficiently, and for automation.
Over the last few years, the ecosystem around the iRODS server has continued to expand. Integration with other types of systems is a valuable way to increase accessibility without teaching existing tools about the iRODS protocol or introducing new tools to users.
With some plumbing, existing tools get the benefit of visibility into an iRODS deployment, supporting WebDAV, FUSE, HTTP, NFS, SFTP, K8s CSI, and S3, for instance.
The iRODS S3 storage resource plugin allows iRODS to use any S3-compatible storage device or service to hold iRODS data objects, on-premise or in the cloud.
This plugin can work as a standalone "cacheless" resource or as an archive resource under the iRODS compound resource. Either configuration provides a POSIX interface to data held on an object storage device or service.
The following S3 services and appliances have been tested:
Amazon (AWS) S3
Fujifilm Object Archive
MinIO S3
Ceph S3
Spectra Logic Vail
Spectra Logic BlackPearl
Google Cloud Storage (GCS)
Wasabi S3
Oracle OCI
Quantum ActiveScale
Garage S3
