Annual Scientific Report 2015

Standby Facility and Database Disaster Recovery
infrastructure in Flint Cross and aligning it with the
wider EBI Disaster Recovery plan. We also deployed a
new storage system that supports the Standby database
backend at the Hemmel Hempstead data centre.
In terms of new services, in 2015 we deployed a
new Delphix appliance on Silver storage, providing
developers with an on-site environment comparable to
the production services offered in Hemel Hempstead.
Our work on Delphix architecture planning for
public-facing technical infrastructure was recognized
with a ‘Best Data Centre Project of the Year’ award at the
Computer Weekly European User Awards 2015 (Figure).
Desktop support
In 2015 we were pleased to expand our Desktop team,
which now includes a Desktop Team Manager to
coordinate the team’s work and an AV support position
to provide AV support for meeting rooms, the media
room and the Kendrew lecture theatre.
We updated documentation and made it more widely
available and accessible to staff, and reviewed our
procedures to ensure we provide a consistent response
to user queries and to optimise OS configurations,
software deployment and the provision of
telecommunications for staff. In 2015 we supported
the 950 client devices in use by 625 users across OSX,
Windows & Linux.
Andy Cafferkey
Systems Applications
Senior Systems Administrator, Cambridge
Positioning Systems, 2000-2003. Pi Group,
Ford Motor Company, 2003-2005.
At EMBL-EBI since 2005, Technical Team
Leader since 2015.
Future plans
In 2016 we will participate in the migration of
Ensembl from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute to
EMBL-EBI. These services will additionally require
virtualisation as they are currently run on physical
servers and will be run on the EMBL-EBI’s Virtual
Infrastructure. The complex migration will be a
collaboration between Ensembl and the Technical
Services Cluster.
We will evaluate, qualify and potentially integrate
commercial cloud infrastructures into the EMBL-EBI’s
infrastructure to provide capacity for running
internal workloads. Addressing the need to update the
institute’s email system, we will evaluate and plan the
implementation of a replacement email system or a full
collaboration system in 2016.
We plan to complete a hardware refresh for the core
virtual infrastructure and vCloud Embassy Cloud. We
will be replacing the majority of the hypervisors with
new servers of at least double the capacity of the existing
servers. This will provide a saving in software licences,
as each licence will provide double the resources to the
infrastructure.
We will also procure hardware to increase the capacity
of the OpenStack Embassy Cloud and the vCloud
Embassy Cloud by approximately 100%. This will enable
us to accommodate growing usage by EMBL-EBI staff
and their external collaborators.
2015 EMBL-EBI Annual Scientific Report 162