NetApp Storage Helps CERN Unlock Secrets of the Universe

Scientists at CERN, the European
Organization for Nuclear Research, search for clues that will help
unlock the secrets of the universe.

In the quest for answers,
scientists gather mind-boggling amounts of data from the trillions of
proton collisions that occur within four points of CERN’s Large
Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world.
It’s from this data that scientists in July uncovered one a new
particle consistent with the long-sought Higgs Boson, a particle that
is believed to give all other particles mass and a finding that
people around the world have been anticipating for more than 50
years.

An data infrastructure such as a
NetApp
storage
foundation,
provides CERN with the ability to deliver impact faster through more
effective search and data management (Itelligent), achieve
non-disruptive operations (Immortal), and scale without limits to
meet the demands of ongoing particle research (Infinite).

"A
primary goal for CERN is to help expand human understanding of the
world we live in,"
said Tony Cass, Databases Services group leader, IT department, CERN.
"The
information that we are searching for is contained within a sea of
data that is equivalent to searching for a needle in 20 million
haystacks. To make these searches a success we require an IT
infrastructure that can store and manage staggering amounts of data
and give us around-the-clock access to it. Oracle Databases running
on top of NetApp storage are a key element of this infrastructure."

Since 2006, CERN has leveraged
NetApp technology to help drive innovation in
scientific discovery. The answers derived from CERN’s particle
research will help explain the universe around us but also accelerate
advancements in information technology.

CERN has achieved results that
include the following:

• LHC experiments create 600 million
  collisions per second, A raw data rate of 1 million GB/s. This
  volume of data must be distributed to physicists to analyze at 140
  computing centers in 35 different countries.

• In addition to NetApp, CERN
  leverages Oracle Database in support of the LHC and relies on NetApp
  to store the data on the Oracle Database, including one with 4.1
  trillion rows of data. This operational data amounts to more than
  50TB per year and is relied upon by scientists to store the
  measurements and instrumentation records needed to calibrate the
  experiments. NetApp helps provide the non-disruptive operations and
  unlimited scalability required to help CERN accelerate science.

• CERN uses NetApp Flash Cache
  technology to increase overall performance and reduce the data center
  footprint by two times what would have been required to manage
  similar technical requirements. As a result, CERN is able to increase
  overall efficiencies and effectively manage its IT operations within
  its fixed resources.