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

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

Customer Company Size

Mid-size Company

Region

Europe

Country

Netherlands

Product

Mirantis OpenStack
Ceph storage
Puppet configuration management
Intel based servers

Tech Stack

OpenStack
Ceph
Puppet
Intel

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Productivity Improvements
Cost Savings
Digital Expertise

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration

Applicable Industries

Education
Life Sciences

Applicable Functions

Product Research & Development
Quality Assurance

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
Data Science Services
System Integration

About The 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.

The 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.

The 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.

Operational Impact

As a result of the Mirantis OpenStack deployment, the Center’s scientists have much faster and more democratized access to high performance research systems.
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.
Rapid scaling of storage for digitizing the 37 million object catalog is substantially more efficient and affordable than before the OpenStack and Ceph deployment.
Using the Fuel deployment and management tool, web servers for research community collaboration can now be provisioned in only ten minutes. As a result, the Center has increased access to their rich species and natural history catalog.
An unexpected benefit is porting Naturalis’ business applications to the OpenStack cloud for easier monitoring and management. The IT team is now moving additional business applications to the cloud. Another unanticipated benefit is that Ceph storage for fileserver backup is now cheaper and easier to use than previous resources.

Quantitative Benefit