Red Hat provides CERN with a platform for mission-critical applications

At CERN, Red Hat Enterprise Linux runs some of the organisation’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, operating system stability is crucial to successful operations, a need fulfilled by the reliability and high availability offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Beyond uptime, Red Hat Enterprise Linux also requires minimal administrative overhead and offers CERN high 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 cutting-edge 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 LHCb, 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 96 GB and 256 GB RAM per server) and a Brocade FC8 SAN with a NetApp data storage system. The infrastructure is designed for high availability and is built to be completely redundant, a critical feature for CERN as control system downtime almost always results in data loss.
Beyond the crucial 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 at Red Hat who helps the Organization take full 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 robust, flexible, enterprise service bus (ESB) platform for integrating applications, data, services, and devices. Based on popular open source technologies, JBoss Fuse provides services for transformation, routing, and log assignments.