Annual Scientific Report 2015

Petteri Jokinen
Systems & Networking
MSc in Computer Science 1990,
Helsinki University.
At EMBL-EBI since 1996.
we have moved away from using tape storage as a full
backup system, favouring a distributed, object-based
redundancy model, in 2015 we developed a new,
cost-effective Object Tape Archive (comprising an IBM
tape library and two tape robots) to ensure we had a
classic backup for the multi-Petabyte sequence archives.
For internal users, we added more high-performance
storage systems, for example deploying a Lustre (Linux
Cluster) for the Functional Annotation of Animal
Genomes project.
We assisted EMBL-EBI teams in planning and
implementing the deployment of multiple individual
devices and larger projects. In addition to the Hadoop
and GPFS projects described above, these included
the OpenStack cloud infrastructure and increased
capacity for virtual machine (VM) ware. We also
improved and updated monitoring of all switch-related
infrastructure components.
Data Centres
In 2014 our team played a major role in the move
of our external-facing data centres from London to
Hemel Hempstead, and in 2015 we consolidated and
rationalised the hardware in both Hinxton and Hemel
Hempstead, for example eliminating many unsupported
elements and services from the Hinxton data centre
network. We also upgraded the core network links in
Hinxton from 10 to 40 Gigabytes per second, further
enhancing service performance across the board.
Physical consolidation was the major challenge of 2015.
Across all three data-centre locations, we retired and
disposed of around 450 devices (a mixture of storage
and compute assets) and installed approximately 230
devices. Furthermore, as priorities shifted and the roles
of devices changed, we physically moved a considerable
number of devices between sites, for example moving
28 racks of equipment between two quadrants in the
Hinxton data centre.
Future plans
Our goal in 2016 is to implement a new, two-tiered
storage strategy for EMBL-EBI: one for performance,
and another for capacity. We also plan to build a new,
high-performance computing cluster for internal
research. We will continue to provide leading-edge
technical infrastructure for our external users, offering
them the opportunity to run Docker containers in our
clusters in a controllable way and, through our Elastic
project, to dynamically resize logical clusters without
interrupting running jobs.
Our team will replace our ageing Domain Name
System (DNS) infrastructure, and tackle application
load balancing problems. We will introduce network
access control to the EMBL-EBI desktop access
network, making it simpler for staff to carry out
internal operations remotely. During 2016 we will also
improve network monitoring, log analysis and network
automation. In addition, we will further explore the
emerging open network-switching market, which offers
potential cost savings and improved flexibility through
the application of open-source management software on
commodity network switch hardware.
Detail from our Tier 3+ data centre in Hemel Hempstead.
2015 EMBL-EBI Annual Scientific Report 160