NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has built a private cloud network based on the Red Hat, Inc. [RHT] OpenStack Platform, the company said April 25.

The private cloud is aimed at saving time and resources spent on data centers by retooling and consolidating JPL’s in-house hardware, Red Hat said. This modernizes JPL’s on-premise data storage and server capability. The laboratory has traditionally housed most of its infrastructure in on-site server hardware.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform is a scalable, production-ready Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). It is co-engineered with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

JPL engineers built the on-site OpenStack cloud because of the flexible and large cloud computing capability, Red Hat said. The next step will have engineers move critical compute activities that need to be on-site into the private cloud architecture.

The OpenStack Platform allows JPL to have an enterprise-scale computing capacity while enabling researchers to tap into both a private cloud and use external cloud resources like the Amazon [AMZN] Web Services system, if needed, Red Hat said.

“We are proud of the partnership with NASA JPL to address their needs for an agile infrastructure to meet their projected growth, while helping to reduce the datacenter footprint,” Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager of OpenStack at Red Hat, said in a statement.

JPL, located in Pasadena, Calif., has conducted many NASA’s space exploration missions, which currently rely on significant computing capability to process requests from flight projects and researchers using mission data.

“NASA JPL is at the forefront of technology-powered innovation and we’re excited about the computing capacity needed for their exploratory missions being powered by Red Hat OpenStack Platform,” Balakrishnan added.