Case Study: Naturalis Biodiversity Center achieves 10x faster research and opens access to its 37M-object catalog with Mirantis OpenStack

Naturalis Biodiversity Center Deploys Massively Scalable OpenStack Cloud to Drive Species Sustainability and Access to 37 Million Object Catalog

Naturalis Biodiversity Center, the Netherlands’ national natural history institute, needed to scale compute and storage to support 700 staff and visiting researchers and to publish its 37 million-object digitized catalog. Rapid growth in DNA sequencing, 3D and GIS data, and a large digitization program strained uneven high-performance desktops and proprietary storage, driving up support costs and preventing broad, timely access for internal and external scientists.

Naturalis deployed a Mirantis OpenStack cloud with Ceph storage (reaching ~1 PB), Fuel and Puppet for automation, and Intel-based nodes in high-availability data centers to centralize and democratize resources. The new IaaS environment cut research runtimes from weeks to days, enabled 10-minute web server provisioning, reduced IT overhead to roughly one full-time admin, lowered storage costs, and expanded secure third‑party access to the biodiversity catalog via APIs.

Naturalis Biodiversity Center

Marc de Hart

ICT Manager