Activities Overview of 2013

Q1 & Q2

Almost one year after the change of datacenter and the main objective of this period has been to plan the BLABLABLA

Infrastructure changes

• Deployed new virtualisation servers to replace ageing Phase C Sun servers. Two new IBM systems were deployed to provide the complete virtualisation service. These new machines have state-of-the-art CPUs and SSDs to provide much better performance and stability compared to old machines. With just two physical servers we are capable of supporting 16 different virtual machines while still having enough room to grow.
• Deployed 5 new physical machines for high throughput services: CREAM-CE, SE head-nodes and CVMFS Squid.
• Increased capacity of the Storage Element to a total of 1600TB. This upgrade was intended to replace the temporary solution provided by CSCS back in August 2012 when the Phase C Sun Thors failed, and to meet the pledges of March 2013.
• Installed the remaining compute nodes (WN) to a total capacity of 23 kHS06 (last 8 systems were installed in Q1 2013).
• Redistributed the WNs across the different racks to assure availability in case of power failure of one of the power supplies.
• Replaced old CMS and ATLAS VO boxes with new more powerful VMs.

Software changes

• Migration of most service nodes to Scientific Linux 6.
• Moved all middleware stack to UMD-2 release.
• Upgraded the Storage Element (SE) software to the last dCache Golden Release (2.2) that will be supported until April 2014. As happened in 2012 with the upgrade from dCache 1.9.5 to 1.9.12, this was a major change in the way the software is configured, and since it is not possible to rollback any of these updates, extensive tests were performed in the preproduction environment.
• Moved the Infiniband software stack in all service nodes from Mellanox-provided software, to standard kernel modules. This has proven to be the most efficient way to configure the Infiniband Network, since we moved from a convoluted upgrade process, to a quick 2-step procedure. Critical and security updates can be applied now very quickly as requested by the EGI Security Office.

Other changes

• Deployed new log management system (logstash) for improved logging traceability.
• Redistributed some of old Sun Thors to UNI-BERN to improve their growing Tier-2 infrastructure. Some decommissioned Sun hardware was also distributed to PSI for spare parts.

-- MiguelGila - 2013-06-06