Austin, TX - April 6, 2011 – Zenoss, Inc., a leading provider of management software for physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT environments, announced today that the Zenoss Enterprise has been chosen as the framework for the Observatory Management System for the Regional Scale Nodes (RSN) component of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) Project.
Scheduled to begin operations in 2014, the RSN component of the OOI Project is a 25-year-long project for exploration and scientific discovery in the Northeast Pacific Ocean led by the University of Washington. This networked system of ocean observing sensors will be interconnected by approximately 500 miles of electro-optical cable and is designed to operate continuously for 25 years, providing ten gigabits per second of telecommunications bandwidth and eight kilowatts of power to each primary instrumented site.
Using this unprecedented availability of power and bandwidth, planned studies using the RSN will address the complexities of the ocean environment and will improve understanding of natural phenomena such as earthquakes, as well as the role of the oceans in modulating short- and long-term changes in climate. The data will be available via the Internet in near real-time and accessible not only to scientists, educators and public policy makers around the world, but also to the general public.
OOI engineers at the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory needed an Observatory Management System (OMS) that would monitor all aspects of the network and server health, collect and save engineering telemetry of the components being monitored, provide notification capabilities when anomalies are detected, and connect the OOI RSN via the Internet to sites across the globe.
After reviewing several network management solutions, the OOI engineers chose to rely on Zenoss because it provided the right mix of functionality, flexibility and most importantly, extensibility. To extend the capabilities of Zenoss, the OOI project engineers will use ZenPacks to 1) customize the GUI; 2) add new customized control options; 3) implement processes for a customized command and control protocol; and 4) implement customized data collectors for retrieving data from specialized targets such as other network management systems running in the observatory.
“We are investing a significant amount of time and energy into a 25-year project and we don’t want to worry about getting locked out of our framework,” said Derrick Côté, an engineer in the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington. “Our developers already are familiar with the open technologies that Zenoss is built on and it’s good to know that training and support are available. We look forward to this public-private research partnership.”
The RSN network is currently under construction in the Northeast Pacific Ocean. The University of Washington plans to leverage the Zenoss framework to provide a custom Northbound Interface for connection into the cyberinfrastructure that will integrate all OOI sites collecting data at coastal, regional, and global scales.
“We are thrilled Zenoss has been selected for this innovative cabled-system project,” said Bill Karpovich, CEO of Zenoss. “Our participation in the Regional Scale Nodes part of the OOI project proves that the potential use cases for IT operations management are as vast as the sea and affirms our commitment to exploring those diverse opportunities.”
Zenoss is the leading provider of IT operations management products for the next generation datacenter. Zenoss Enterprise is a single, integrated product that monitors the entire IT infrastructure where ever it is deployed - physical, virtual, or in the cloud. With a community of over 100,000 users, Zenoss products monitor over one million network and server devices daily and have been used in over 25,000 organizations in 180 countries around the world. Commercial customers include leading companies such as Rackspace, VMware, LinkedIn, Carlson, Motorola and Deutsche Bank. To learn more about Zenoss' award-winning IT operations management software, visit https://www.zenoss.com.
The OOI, a project funded by the National Science Foundation, is planned as a networked infrastructure of science-driven sensor systems to measure the physical, chemical, geological and biological variables in the ocean and seafloor. The OOI will be one fully integrated system collecting data on coastal, regional and global scales.
Greater knowledge of the ocean’s interrelated systems is vital for increased understanding of their effects of biodiversity, global warming, ocean and coastal ecosystems, environmental health and climate. OOI will put real time ocean observing data in the hands of a vast user community of oceanographers, scientists and researchers, educators and the public.
The OOI Program is managed and coordinated by the OOI Project Office at the Consortium for Ocean Leadership, in Washington, D.C., and is responsible for construction and initial operations of the OOI network. Three major Implementing Organizations are responsible for construction and development of the overall program. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and its partners, Oregon State University and Scripps Institution of Oceanography are responsible for the coastal and global moorings and their autonomous vehicles. The University of Washington is responsible for cabled seafloor systems and moorings. The University of California, San Diego, is implementing the cyberinfrastructure component. Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is responsible for education and public engagement.