Rackspace Technology is working with CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society, to accelerate its scientific knowledge management breakthroughs by modernizing its OpenStack® Private Cloud. The mission-critical private cloud environment supports CAS in providing scientific innovators with access to cutting-edge, lifesaving, chemistry-related, and life-science research.
As a leader in science information, CAS connects the world's scientific knowledge to accelerate breakthroughs that improve lives. Established as a volunteer effort in 1907, CAS officially became a self-supporting division in 1956. CAS has been an OpenStack customer with Rackspace Technology for over ten years.
"We help people, companies, institutions, and academics develop scientific innovations faster like cancer drugs and vaccines. It may sound cliché, but CAS is helping empower the scientific discoveries that are saving people's lives," said Luke Chandler, Senior Director of Cloud Platforms and Solutions, Infrastructure and Support Services for CAS. "We partnered with Rackspace as our managed service provider to raise the bar for our private cloud on OpenStack — including everything from resiliency to reliability to service robustness. We underwent a full redesign to achieve modernization of our cloud infrastructure."
CAS sought to modernize its OpenStack environment to enhance the resiliency, reliability, and functionality of its private cloud, which hosts its solutions. CAS prioritized high availability, reliability, and performance to meet its cloud platform's highest standards. A critical project was a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) upgrade that moved CAS forward several OpenStack versions with zero downtime.
Rackspace Technology provides expertise and manages three crucial CAS OpenStack environments, which are deployed on-premises in its data centers, including:
A development cloud for testing updates
A non-production cloud for pre-production testing
A production cloud hosting live services on the latest hardware
"Rackspace played a crucial role in enabling CAS to implement a robust private cloud, offering more choices. The partnership and leadership from Rackspace were instrumental in this transformation. This high-stakes undertaking was a substantial leap forward for CAS, contributing to the organization's credibility and success," added Chandler.
"95% of organizations that leverage OpenStack chose to build with a partner, so finding a successful partner is crucial. Rackspace co-founded OpenStack in 2010, so we know how to build an OpenStack infrastructure at scale," said Lance Weaver, Chief Product and Technology Officer for Private Cloud, Rackspace Technology. "CAS has a high number of nodes, so we helped them scale, and our expertise, along with our history, puts us in a position to ensure customer success by optimizing deployment at a significant cost reduction."
Looking ahead, CAS is focused on supporting the launch of its new life sciences product line, the CAS BioFinder Discovery Platform™, while going through a complete Private Cloud OpenStack lifecycle program. The next collaboration and iteration of the CAS private cloud aims to support customer-facing products better and accommodate new workloads.
