M. Coelho dos Santos’s scientific contributions

In May 2012 CERN signed a contract with the Wigner Data Centre in Budapest for an extension to 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 adaptations of hardware architecture, procurement and delivery procedures undertaken 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 the 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 drive bays) to Wigner in March 2013. Changes were made to the abstract file on 13/06/2014 to correct errors, the pdf file was unchanged.

The large potential and flexibility of the ServiceNow infrastructure based on "best practises" methods is allowing the migration of some of the ticketing systems traditionally used for the monitoring of the servers and services available at the CERN IT Computer Centre. This migration enables the standardization and globalization of the ticketing and control systems implementing a generic system extensible to other departments and users. One of the activities of the Service Management project together with the Computing Facilities group has been the migration of the ITCM structure based on Remedy to ServiceNow within the context of one of the ITIL processes called Event Management. The experience gained during the first months of operation has been instrumental towards the migration to ServiceNow of other service monitoring systems and databases. The usage of this structure is also extended to the service tracking at the Wigner Centre in Budapest.

With many servers and server parts the environment of warehouse sized data centres is increasingly complex. Server life-cycle management and hardware failures are responsible for frequent changes that need to be managed. To manage these changes better a project codenamed “hardware hound” focusing on hardware failure trending and hardware inventory has been started at CERN. By creating and using a hardware oriented data set - the inventory - with detailed information on servers and their parts as well as tracking changes to this inventory, the project aims at, for example, being able to discover trends in hardware failure rates.

The CERN Data Centre is reviewing strategies for optimizing the use of the existing infrastructure and expanding to a new data centre by studying how other large sites are being operated. Over the past six months, CERN has been investigating modern and widely-used tools and procedures used for virtualisation, clouds and fabric management in order to reduce operational effort, increase agility and support unattended remote data centres. This paper gives the details on the project's motivations, current status and areas for future investigation.