Tuesday 29 June 2010

Occupying Lancaster's new data centre



Lancaster had a scheduled downtime yesterday to relocate half our storage and CPU to the new High End Computing data centre. The move went very smoothly and both storage and CPU are back online running ATLAS (and other) jobs. The new HEC facility is a significant investment from Lancaster University with the multi million pound building housing central IT facilities, co-location, and HEC data centres.

Lancaster's GridPP operations have a large stake in HEC with Roger Jones (GridPP/ATLAS) taking directorship of the facility. Our future hardware procurement will be located in this room which has a 35-rack capacity using water-cooled Rittel racks. Below are some photographs of the room as it looks today. Ten racks are in place with two being occupied by GridPP hardware and the remaining eight to be populated in July with £800k worth of compute and storage resource.