Red Hat Provides CERN With Platform for Mission-Critical Applications

Red Hat, Inc. announced that CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat Technical Account Management services to provide a reliable and stable platform for mission-critical applications.

CERN LHC

The project includes nearly 600 servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux operated by CERN at its Geneva datacenter, fulfilling database, application server and backup and recovery functions.

At CERN, Red Hat Enterprise Linux runs some of the organization’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. Given the nature of these applications, OS stability is crucial to operations, a need fulfilled by the reliability and HA offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Beyond uptime, Red Hat Enterprise Linux also requires minimal administrative overhead and offers CERN flexibility and rapid deployment times for key applications and services.

In addition to using an infrastructure based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CERN also runs Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization in its LHCb experiment, which focuses primarily on identifying the differences between matter and antimatter. A stable and reliable IT infrastructure, such as that provided by Red Hat’s solutions, is critical to LHC, as it supports the controlling, configuring, and monitoring functions for approximately one million systems and processes, including detectors, temperature sensors, and power supply units as well as entire software processes.

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 96GB and 256GB RAM per server) and a Brocade FC8 SAN with a NetApp storage system. The infrastructure is designed for HA and is built to be redundant, a critical feature for CERN as control system downtime almost always results in data loss.

Beyond the technologies delivered, CERN’s Red Hat subscription enables the organization to take advantage of Red Hat Technical Account Management (TAM) services. Through Red Hat TAM, CERN is assigned a dedicated technical contact person helps the organization take advantage of its investment in Red Hat solutions, offering active consultation services and support in both strategic and operative decision-making processes.

A long-term Red Hat customer, CERN also uses other solutions from the open source specialist in different IT areas. For example, the organization uses Red Hat JBoss Fuse, a flexible, enterprise service bus (ESB) platform for integrating applications, data, services, and devices. Based on open source technologies, JBoss Fuse provides services for transformation, routing, and log assignments.

Tim Bell, group leader of IT OSs and infrastructure services, CERN, said: “We appreciate the stability and availability of solutions from Red Hat. This is extremely important to us because we use these solutions in highly critical areas where commercial support, resilience and reliability are key requirements.“

Niko Neufeld, deputy project leader, CERN, said: “Our LHCb experiment requires a powerful, very reliable and highly available IT environment for controlling and monitoring our 70 million CHF detector. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is at the core of our virtualized infrastructure and complies with our stringent requirements.“

Leonard Bodmer, Red Hat country manager, Switzerland, said: “We are very proud of the fact that a world renowned research institute such as CERN has not only selected Red Hat solutions, but also because these products are used in such critical areas of the organization. In the instance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, this is further evidence of the platform’s success in supporting mission-critical applications, regardless of their end purpose or composition. Naturally, we are looking forward to further collaboration with CERN and we are pleased to know that with our solutions, we are able to make a small contribution to innovative research initiatives.“