Cloud Storage Meets the Challenge at CERN

Alberto Pace, Head of Data & Storage Services Group at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) talks about the IT challenges the institution faces and how CERN openlab will utilize emerging technologies such as cloud to overcome them.

Pace considers the most important IT challenge to be keeping up with the evolution of computing in the last 20-30 years. “In particular, storage and networking are crucial to ensuring a very high efficiency in data analysis/processing at CERN.” He also highlights the expectations for cloud computing, “Cloud computing is one of the most important innovations that has happened in the recent 2-3 years and this represents an important opportunity to maintain or increase our efficiency, probably, but certainly reducing our costs in terms of overall cost of ownership.”

In collaboration with the globe’s ICT leaders, CERN has established CERN openlab, whose mission is to accelerate the development of cutting-edge IT solutions for use by the global particle physics community. Huawei’s Universal Distributed Storage (UDS) solution has been successfully deployed at CERN openlab. “The motivation for CERN to have an industrial partner in storage was to explore and investigate the use of cloud storage in our data center. It is essential for us to understand the consequences and the changes that we have to do in our infrastructure to be ready to use industrial solutions in the next years. And in these respects, Huawei had similar goals for the investigations that we wanted to carry out and therefore we came to an agreement where investigations together in these areas would bring a mutual benefit for both CERN and Huawei.”

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