ACADEMIA

Red Hat announced that Pattern Energy Group LP, a leading independent wind energy and transmission company, is using Red Hat Storage, formerly Gluster, technology to manage business-critical weather prediction data. Pattern Energy identifies opportunities in the renewable energy sector, creating and implementing plans to convert opportunities into operating assets. Pattern Energy chose Red Hat Storage Software Appliance for high-performance, highly reliable and scalable storage.

"Our business is based on a technology that produces a large amount of data, requiring constant uptime in order to monitor and produce wind and energy estimates," said Chad Ringley, manager of atmospheric modeling at Pattern Energy. "With the way we're using the system now, it's supporting our day-to-day operations, meeting time constraints and allowing forecasts to run automated on the system. Overall Red Hat Storage is providing us with an extremely stable system with outstanding uptime and is allowing us to run our business more efficiently."

Pattern Energy deployed Red Hat Storage Software Appliance in its atmospheric modeling operations to estimate wind energy history and precisely forecast weather three to five days in advance. Red Hat Storage has allowed the organization to more effectively develop new wind projects due to its ability to analyze data of past wind behavior at multiple locations around the world. This type of heads-up knowledge enables Pattern to more effectively manage its energy-producing assets. As part of more efficiently managing its operational assets, Pattern Energy uses the data stored with Red Hat Storage Software Appliance to provide its maintenance crews with deeper insight into the weather forecast so that they can better plan required preventative and repair maintenance, ultimately avoiding times when wind speed is high and energy production is paramount.

Pattern Energy is also experiencing cost savings with Red Hat Storage. The studies it now conducts in-house on wind pattern predictions and other solar research using Red Hat Storage Software Appliance would typically need to be purchased from a third-party research firm. Studies by these firms cost anywhere between $15,000-$25,000. Since deploying Red Hat Storage, Pattern Energy has conducted hundreds of these studies on its own, allowing the company to reduce costs and save money.

"Red Hat Storage is providing Pattern Energy with a business-critical storage solution that allows it to effectively manage its data-intensive environment," said Ranga Rangachari, general manager, Storage at Red Hat. "Our storage solution is enabling Pattern Energy to achieve its business goals by delivering high-performance, highly reliable and scalable storage that enables the company to save money and to better manage its energy-producing assets."

Red Hat Storage Software Appliance lets enterprises deploy storage the same way they deploy computing today--as a virtualized, commoditized and scale-on-demand pool, improving storage economics. Combined with the customer's choice of commodity computing and storage resources, Red Hat Storage can scale-out to petabytes of capacity and GB/s of throughput at a fraction of the cost of proprietary systems. Red Hat Storage offers high availability with n-way replication both within and between public and private data centers. Red Hat Storage Software Appliance is deployable both on-premise (as a virtual appliance or bare-metal software appliance) and in public clouds such as Amazon Web Services. Red Hat Storage is the primary author and maintainer of the open-source GlusterFS software.