Comtrade, a leading provider of IT infrastructure management and monitoring solutions, has joined CERN openlab as an associate member. The collaboration will address the accessibility, manageability and scalability of the EOS storage system used by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). By improving EOS deployment, data access and management, Comtrade will enhance collaboration among the growing number of research organizations participating in the experiments on the world’s most powerful particle accelerator – the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
As part of CERN’s mission to study the basic constituents of matter, the Organization stores and shares data with collaborating institutions around the globe. The CERN Data Centre collects more than 30 petabytes of data per year from the LHC experiments. CERN’s EOS Large Scale Storage System is the keystone of the LHC data processing, with installations across two centers for a total 140 petabytes of installed disk space.
The amount of data produced by the LHC experiments is increasing dramatically, and the number of research organizations participating in these experiments is also growing. Consequently, CERN has a plan to productize the EOS system, in order to facilitate easy data access and use by external contributors. Due to its extensive expertise in storage, network and systems management, Comtrade was selected to enhance the EOS’s capabilities.
“We have a tremendous amount of data that needs to be managed, and this is rapidly growing,” said Alberto Di Meglio, head of CERN openlab. “We provide reliable access and support to the researchers collaborating in the experiments. Comtrade’s expertise will be a huge asset in helping us to continue supporting our community in this manner, even as experimental collaborations grow and more data is produced.”
To facilitate the research being conducted around the world with the LHC data, the EOS system will need to be deployed and managed in a straightforward manner, regardless of the amount of data and the complexity of the IT environment. The goal is to provide reliable and fast streaming storage to fulfill the experiments’ unprecedented requirements for data processing, data distribution and user analysis.
As part of its support for the LHC research program, Comtrade has officially joined CERN openlab. CERN openlab is a unique public-private partnership that accelerates the development of cutting-edge solutions for the worldwide LHC community and wider scientific research. Through CERN openlab, CERN collaborates with leading ICT companies and research institutes.
“The important research that CERN enables around the globe depends on giving scientists fast, easy access to vast amounts of data 24/7,” said Simon Taylor, senior vice president and general manager of System Software and Tools at Comtrade. “We are proud to be a member of CERN openlab, and we look forward to contributing our expertise and efforts in order to provide researchers with more efficient access and support to LHC data from CERN.”
