Speaker
Olof Barring
(CERN)
Description
In May 2012 CERN signed a contract with the Wigner Data Centre in Budapest for an extension to the CERN’s central computing facility beyond its current boundaries set by electrical power and cooling available for computing. The centre is operated as a remote co-location site providing rack-space, electrical power and cooling for server, storage and networking equipment acquired by CERN. The contract includes a ‘remote-hands’ services for physical handling of hardware (rack mounting, cabling, pushing power buttons, …) and maintenance repairs (swapping disks, memory modules, …). However, only CERN personnel have network and console access to the equipment for system administration. This report gives an insight to undertaken adaptations of hardware architecture, procurement and delivery procedures enabling remote physical handling of the hardware. We will also describe tools and procedures developed for automating the registration, burn-in testing, acceptance and maintenance of the equipment as well as an independent but important change to the IT assets management (ITAM) developed in parallel as part of CERN IT Agile Infrastructure project. Finally, we will report on experience from the first large delivery of 400 servers and 80 SAS JBOD expansion units (24 bays) to Wigner in March 2013.
Author
Olof Barring
(CERN)
Co-authors
Afroditi Xafi
Alain Gentit
(CERN)
Anthony Grossir
(CERN)
Benoit Clement
(CERN)
Eric Bonfillou
(CERN)
Miguel Coelho dos Santos
(CERN)
Vincent Dore
(CERN)
Wayne Salter
(CERN)
