Terrell Russell, Ph.D.

@terrellrussell

Executive Director, iRODS Consortium

Consortium Update

June 17-20, 2025

iRODS User Group Meeting 2025

Durham, NC

17th Annual iRODS User Group Meeting

Welcome!

17th Annual iRODS User Group Meeting

17th Annual iRODS User Group Meeting

Thank you!

Markus Kitsinger

Martin Flores

Derek Dong

Lance Leathers

Ramsey Jooss

Sameer Khan

Yujun Ming

Users

Sponsors

Venues

Catering

Laura Capps

Kory Draughn

Alan King

Justin James

Daniel Moore

Jayasree Jaganatha

Marcus Anderson

Stephanie Suber

The iRODS Consortium

Our Mission

  • Continuous Improvement
  • Grow the Community
  • Standardization
  • Show value to our Membership
  • Sustainability

The iRODS Consortium

Founded in 2013

The iRODS Consortium

SRB started at SDSC in 1995

Reagan Moore

Chaitan Baru

Michael Wan

Arcot Rajasekar

Wayne Schroeder

Richard Marciano

Richard Frost

Randall Sharpe

Robert Templeton

David Wade

Thomas Hacker

Our Business Model

Start with proof of concept

  • Use Case Driven
  • Hands on
  • Service and Support Contracts

 

Consortium Membership

  • Four Levels - $12k to $90k
  • 10 hours of support
  • Participation in Software roadmap
  • Discounted hourly rate

 

Tier 3 Support

  • Systems Integrators
  • Compute Vendors
  • Storage Vendors

Our Membership

Consortium

Member

Consortium

Member

Consortium

Member

Since iRODS UGM 2024

  • 22 Membership Renewals
  • 3 New Members
  • 2 New Service Contracts
  • Multiple Proofs of Concept
  • 11 Conferences and Events
  • 4 Internships

Since iRODS UGM 2024 - New Memberships

2024-2025 Working Groups

Technology Working Group

  • Goal: To keep everyone up to date, provide a forum for roadmap discussion and collaboration opportunities
    • All iRODS Consortium Membership

 

Metadata Templates Working Group (Dissolved)

  • Goal: To define a standardized process for the application and management of metadata templates by the iRODS Server
    • NIEHS, Utrecht, Maastricht, Arizona / CyVerse, KU Leuven

 

Authentication Working Group

  • Goal: To provide a more flexible authentication mechanism to the iRODS Server
    • SURF, NIEHS, Sanger, Arizona / CyVerse, IT4Innovation, Utrecht, KU Leuven

S3 Working Group

  • Goal: To develop tools to present iRODS as S3-compatible storage to existing S3 clients
    • Arizona / CyVerse, NIEHS, SURF

 

 

Imaging Working Group

  • Goal: To provide a standardized suite of imaging policies and practices for integration with existing tools and pipelines
    • New York University, Santa Clara University, UC San Diego, NIEHS, Harvard, Arizona / CyVerse, Open Microscopy Environment (OMERO), UNC Neuroscience Microscopy Core, KU Leuven, Maastricht, NYU Langone, UMass Medical, Netherlands Cancer Institute, Sanger, UCSC, Crick (UK), U. Osnabrück, CRS4 (Italy), RIKEN (Japan)

Organized community efforts to standardize protocols, technologies, and methodologies

2024-2025 Efforts

  • New Major Version
    • Met backwards compatibility promise for 11 years 

 

  • Standardization
    • Metadata Templates
    • Authentication
    • Protocol Plumbing

 

  • Partnerships for broader impact
    • Globus
    • OMERO
    • RSpace
    • Dataverse
    • Some under NDA

 

  • ​Continued RENCI engagement and projects
    • ​Focus on return on investment and university initiatives​

2024-2025 Survey

Area Aggregated Responses
zones most organizations have 1, some have up to 10 zones federated
servers average 2-3 servers per zone
 - usually in VMs, some docker
 - larger installations managed via ansible and puppet
 - 16GB RAM, up to 1TB
data most less than 1PB, up to 50PB under management
- many holding 100M to 500M data objects
database most using postgresql, some mysql
network mix of 10G and 100G network interfaces
storage Lenovo and IBM StorageScale, Dell PowerScale OneFS, NetApp, iTernity, mounted as NFS or unixfilesystem, and S3 (both cloud and local)
tape relatively rare, managed by others
automatic tiering still rare, but interest/testing beginning
data sources very wide variety, from microscopes, telescopes, simulations, smartphones, ECG/EEG machines, sequencers, students in courses
logs larger installations aggregate and monitor via rsyslog

2024-2025 Survey

Hardest Things

  • Concurrent database connection management
  • Migrating from iRODS Rule Language to Python rules
  • Seeing metrics per user, per institute, per faculty, per group
  • Seeing age of data in aggregate, i.e. data retention compliance
  • Decoupling logic for zone-wide rules and collection-wide rules

2024-2025 Trends

Local Control

  • Hybrid deployments and topologies are becoming necessary and normal
  • Repatriation and domestic control of data and data products
  • Sovereignty concerns over hyperscalers and runaway costs
  • Your data as a moat due to AI/LLMs/LRMs
  • Compliance with both in-house and regulatory requirements

 

Standardization Efforts

  • Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH)
  • OME-Zarr
  • JWT/JWK/OAuth2

2024-2025 Finances

The iRODS Consortium serves as a sustainability model around the software.

 

This requires evangelism, outreach, and funds.


We are not there yet.   We need your help.

 

Members

  • Request / Demand engagement from your vendors
    • Make sure they are aware of and compatible with iRODS
  • Share ROI of Membership with us
  • Share ROI of Membership with your executives
  • Share ROI of Membership with your neighbors and partner organizations

 

Consortium Partnerships

  • Products
  • Revenue sharing
  • Services

Next Year

We met our 11-year backwards compatibility promise.

 

 

iRODS 5 is here.

 

 

Now we get to push forward.

Thank you

Questions?