Features
Launching NASA/JPL Into the Cloud
2010 Chairman's Award for Excellence Recipient
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was out of data center space and CSC helped them determine that the cost of building a new 10,000-square-foot data center would be $40 million. JPL needed an alternative, cost-effective approach to keep up with continued exponential growth in computing demand.
CSC had already led a virtualization effort at JPL to maximize the compute capacity of existing data center floor space; now it was time to take the next step, to cloud computing.
JPL partnered with CSC to understand cloud computing and embark on a journey that has led to establishing JPL as a cloud leader in the U.S. federal government. The goal was to not only solve the compute capacity problem, but to do more with less. This enabled more of JPL’s budget to be focused on NASA’s missions of space exploration and climate change research and less on IT.
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Related Information: Learn about our Leading Edge Forum. Watch a short video. See list of all 2010 Chairman's Award for Excellence recipients. |
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This was the first time CSC had undertaken a cloud project with the complexities of a NASA environment. Our team included Virinder Dhillon, Neil Kronimus, Todd Lucas and Joseph Marphis. They drew on extensive experience and expertise in technical architecture, design, engineering, networking and security. They devised a secure way to handle a federal customer who needs to be compliant with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). As a result, CSC successfully demonstrated the use of trusted clouds in the federal sector and created a cloud solution for federal clients.
CSC’s Trusted Cloud Services (powered by Terremark) provide JPL with compute, storage and network services. JPL is CSC’s first customer for the Trusted Cloud environment, a highly secure environment that meets JPL’s stringent security requirements. The cloud is flexible and fast, enabling JPL to provision servers in minutes with a few mouse clicks. JPL can be more responsive to business needs, and only pays for cloud services used.
The cloud solution for JPL was the first cloud to meet federal compliance regulations for security, reliability and transparency. In addition, it was the first community cloud built using VMware virtualization technology, which facilitates easier migration from VMware-based enterprise data centers.
New capabilities were developed to provide:
- A secure virtual private network (VPN) connection between a community trusted cloud and private data center resources
- To enable cloud bursting into a trusted cloud
- To use trusted cloud infrastructure as a disaster recovery site for continuity of operations planning.