CERN Data Center Deploys Red Hat Virtualization

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat Technical Account Management services across nearly 600 servers in its Geneva data centre.

Red Hat said its Enterprise Linux is running some of CERN's most critical applications, including the Large Hadron Collider Logging Server and the central financial and HR systems for CERN's members of personnel and 11,000 users. CERN also runs Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization in its cutting-edge LHCb experiment, which focuses primarily on identifying the differences between matter and antimatter.

The infrastructure is comprised of physical two-socket servers and is virtualized using Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization on Dell PowerEdge M610 servers (with Intel Nehalem or Ivy Bridge processors with between 96 GB and 256 GB RAM per server) and a Brocade FC8 SAN with a NetApp data storage system. The infrastructure is designed for high availability and is built to be completely redundant, a critical feature for CERN as control system downtime almost always results in data loss.

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