HP is increasing the performance of the CERN network
HP has announced that CERN, the European Research Institute for Particle Physics, the world’s largest and most prestigious research center, has chosen HP network solutions to enhance the performance, reliability and security of its network infrastructure.
The more than 10 scientists and engineers who make up CERN's research team need to share large amounts of data quickly and securely with other researchers working at CERN and around the world. Faced with the challenges of information explosion and data analysis, CERN has asked HP to further develop its network infrastructure. CERN's campus network infrastructure is responsible for ensuring efficient and fault-tolerant communication between CERN's various research sites. To this end, it has been decided that an Internet protocol supporting IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version 6) packet-switched networking will soon be introduced.
HP network solutions play an important role in the HP Converged Infrastructure, which integrates servers, storage, and network devices into collaborative resources. HP and CERN have long been researching and developing network technologies. For example, the CINBAD project (a CERN program for examining network behavior and detecting anomalies) launched in collaboration with HP is based entirely on HP network technology. The goal of CINBAD is to learn about the behavior of an extensive computer network in high-performance computers and campus-like environments like CERN. A wide range of network applications can be studied and tested on the CERN campus network of more than 10 active end-user devices connected by 50 kilometers of cable and fiber, as well as 2500 switches and routers.
The preferred network solution for researchers
Today, CERN's facilities around Geneva are supported by HP E-Series switches. These sites house CERN’s six particle accelerators, including the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, and the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) project, the world’s most extensive international scientific grid service. With WLCG, scientists can share, store and analyze 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes) of data annually. CERN has chosen the HP E6600, E5412 and E8212 switches and the HP E3500 smart edge switches to connect servers in data centers in Geneva sites. These open standards-based solutions ensure the monitoring, scalability and flexible and secure operation of CERN's network so that the organization can easily and cost-effectively migrate to IPv6.
